Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother, one of those givens, when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself. – Adrienne Rich, 1976, p 36
Introduction
Matrescence – a term coined by the anthropologist Dana Raphael (1975) – is defined as the process of becoming a mother and describes the physical, psychological, and emotional changes that occur. [Note 1] Lucy Jones’s recent book Matrescence: On the metamorphosis of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood (2023) situates becoming mother in the wider context of the natural world and argues that many of the rituals and support systems that are important during this time are missing from Western cultures. In this becoming, there is also a sense of unbecoming, of the “irreplaceable clarity of the borders of the self” (Baraitser, 2009: 49) being blurred or eroded. [Note 2]
This article explores matrescence as simultaneously becoming and unbecoming through analysis of two case studies of performance works made by mother/artists based in Scotland in response to their experiences of matrescence during the COVID-19 pandemic. [Note 3] Laura Bradshaw’s Matrescence (2022) (fig. 1) and Stephanie Black-Daniels’ Position & Attachment (2022) (fig. 2) explore becoming a mother in relation to particular outdoor sites through the lens of maternal performance-making (Šimić & Underwood-Lee, 2021, 2023) via diptych film works.
Bradshaw’s Matrescence (2022), produced in collaboration with Monika Smekot and the Glasgow-based mother’s singing group Thula Mama, is a site-specific dance film displayed over two screens as a diptych. The work was originally presented where it was filmed: East Pollockshields Quad, a small green space situated in an area between tenement flats in the South Side of Glasgow. Shown in a gallery situated on the top of a hill in Edinburgh, Black-Daniel’s Position & Attachment included a two channel film and performance installation presented as a diptych, two print works (PL and AR created by performing actions to pull the ink repeatedly onto it, using breastfeeding data), and an installation of superclad debris netting (a material used to protect scaffolding), hung across the space, dividing the light entrance and the dark space where the films were playing on a loop. Both of these works were free and repeated for a duration of time while audiences could move in and out of the spaces.
This article builds on Baraitser’s notion that motherhood can be a generative experience as well as a destabilizing one claiming “We must surely contend with the notion that motherhood produces something new” (2009, p. 7). I argue that matrescence can evoke both a sense of a new maternal subjectivity – what Katherine Nolan refers to as maternal ontology (Nolan, 2021) – and a grief at the negation of the known self and that this is pertinent to performance artists who work with autobiographical material. This destabilizing oscillation of moving forward (a new aspect of identity emerging) and looking back (an unravelling or rupture of the previous sense of subjectivity), can be experienced as a simultaneous becoming and unbecoming. [Note 4]
The medium of live performance relates to the maternal as embodied, relation and durational practices (Šimić & Underwood-Lee, 2021). Bradshaw and Black-Daniels are artists who work with their own live bodies in performance. However, due to COVID-19 restrictions and the impossibility of live audiences, both artists used performance to camera in a diptych of films shown side-by-side and played on a loop to convey the repetitive nature of maternal work. Performance to camera can include many similar performance qualities to live performance, but has a different intended audience and also provides opportunities for digital manipulation and film editing. Šimić and Underwood-Lee argue that “Maternal subjectivity must continuously reinvent itself’ and contend that the maternal is “ongoing, unending, and relentless” (2021, p. 16). Considering experiences of the maternal alongside digital subjectivity, EL Putnam defines an aesthetics of interruption (2022). Her recent analysis of matrescence in the context of digital performance which employs glitches, blackouts, lags, multiple perspectives and layering of images, informs my reading of these performance works. I offer my analysis of these examples as a mother myself, and in my readings my own experiences are inevitably entangled. I am a white, Scottish woman; a writer, researcher and educator in the field of contemporary performance, most recently considering the impact of the pandemic on live performance mediums (Performance in a pandemic, co-edited with Lucy Weir in 2021).
Fig. 1 (left). Laura Bradshaw, Matrescence, Presented as part of Tramway’s Beyond Walls programme, Glasgow on 31st August 2022.
Fig. 2 (right). Stephanie Black-Daniels, Position & Attachment, presented by Collective on the Hillside, Edinburgh, 17 Sep 2022 — 20 Nov 2022.
Matrescent Subjectivity
Matrescence provokes the emergence of a new identity (“mother”); a shift that is one of the most significant experiences of transition in adulthood. For mother/artists who work with their live bodies in performance, the context of both becoming a mother and the COVID-19 pandemic provoked new enquiries and modes of art-making. As Putnam claims, “Art does not just portray maternal bodies but also functions as expressions of subjectivity emerging from the experiences of the artists or the subjects of the work” (2022, p. 57). Acknowledging the lineage of mothers who have sought to make visible their maternal labor and experiences through artistic practice, this article explores how matrescence can be simultaneously a becoming and an unbecoming. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of becoming (Rosi Braidotti 2011, 2013 and Sara Ahmed 2017), and unbecoming (Jack Halberstam 2011, Mary Bunch 2013 and Putnam 2022) this article discusses how these performances provide a space to explore and disseminate experiences of matrescence. [Note 5]
Becoming
In A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (1980), Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work of experimental philosophy based on a-linear and multiplicitous rhizomatic thought and systems theory, they suggest the process of becoming is not one of imitation or mimesis but is generative of a new way of being. [Note 6] We may experience a number of becomings in our lifetimes, moments of being suspended at a threshold, of uncertainty and potentiality. These periods or states which mark significant changes impact understandings of the self (i.e., becoming a girl, becoming a woman, becoming a mother). Iris Marion Young (1980) discusses how becoming a girl is learning how the body relates to space;by the age of five, girls are already cultured to move through the world differently, to try to make themselves smaller and reduce motility with the male gaze impacting their experience and sense of subjectivity (Mulvey, 1988). Ahmed argues that these transitions experienced by women also act as an awakening, of beginning to understand the world and how gender becomes reductive for women. Ahmed adds her own to this list of gendered becomings: “Becoming feminist: how we redescribe the world we are in. We begin to identify how what happened to me, happens to others” (2017, p. 27).
Ahmed argues that becoming feminist can also be seen as becoming a problem, as if by naming the problem, it is made visible. She cites feminist sociologist Ann Oakley (1980) who claimed that societal expectations led women to believe that in becoming mothers, they would be happy. Ahmed argues that this had the consequence of pathologizing unhappiness (2017) and for mothers who were not content, or ambivalent, saw this as their own failing. Oakley describes post-natal depression as “a pseudo-scientific tag for the description and ideological transformation of maternal discontent” (1980, p. 277). If society frames becoming mother in an idealized way, then those for whom matrescence is also (inevitably) an unbecoming feel that they are at fault. While post-natal/post-partum depression is more commonly diagnosed today than in the 1980s, there are still many mothers who do not disclose their experiences for fear that they will be perceived as an unfit mother. I note the word “transformation” in Oakley’s description in relation to maternal discontent: a becoming described is also an unbecoming. Jones argues that sending a high-risk group of people off to spend an unknown period of time at home looking after their babies and recovering from their birth experience is questionable: “We give them a shedload of impossible cultural expectations and myths, including the imperative to enjoy every minute. Are these the actions of a responsible or functional society?” (2023, p. 169). In becoming a mother, some people experience the loneliest time in their lives (Jones, 2023) and the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this further for many with rules around isolating and staying at home enforced by governments. Some also experience the transformation of matrescence as an unbecoming, their sense of identity becoming untethered or seismically altered.
Unbecoming
The prefix “un” usually changes the meaning of an existing word: it becomes a shorthand for “not” and can transform adjectives, adverbs, and nouns to mean the reverse, or opposite. Is becoming not also a doing word? Like writing/dancing/birthing? The idea of becoming a woman can have connotations of negation. Writer Ursula Le Guin claimed that to be a wife and mother is to turn into a “nobody” (Phillips, 2022, p. 7) and Ahmed agrees: “becoming woman; being no more” (2017, p. 44). Baraitser questions the idea of transformation in the experience of matrescence:
Transformation suggests a magical movement from one state to another. But the transition to motherhood contains a certain horror; disintegration, the birth of a state of being excessive to unity… Yet this unpleasant state also has creative potential. (2009, p. 63)
Karina Quinn frames this as“The me and the not-me. In the night, with a wrapped baby and aching biceps, the I-was battling quietly at the I-am” (2012. n.p.). This oscillation between the “I-was” and the “I-am,” of being a subject-in-process, could have creative potential as Baraitser suggests, opening a wider range of emotional, physical, spatial and temporal experiences to draw from when making performance from an autobiographical perspective.
If unbecoming is not a negation, and not a not-becoming as the word might suggest, it is important to consider what the word itself connotes. Definitions include “not flattering/unseemly” and the dictionary provides the following synonyms: unattractive, unsightly, plain, ugly, ugly-looking, hideous, unsuitable, unsuited and ill-suited. The dictionary also states “If you describe a person’s behavior or remarks as unbecoming, you mean that they are shocking and unsuitable for that person” (Collins Dictionary, 2023). Becoming mother can entail becoming unbecoming, a sense of wearing a guise that is ill-fitting, inhabiting a body that feels unexpected. Baraitser states of maternal subjectivity:
Motherhood, it appears, is a condition in which the self budges up to make room for another, and is radically changed in the process. The self undergoes a fundamental transformation of state, from something solid, unified, singular, to something messy, interdependent, and altogether more blurred. (2009, p. 50)
Matrescence provokes this blurring between becoming and unbecoming, between past and the present selves (Quinn, 2012), from the known to the unknown. Jones argues that the matrescent brain undergoes a radical metamorphosis, and that this is not only experienced by those who give birth; that both male and female brain circuitry evolves through rearing children (2023).
In The queer art of failure, Halberstam calls for an “anti-social feminism, a form of feminism preoccupied with negativity and negation” (2011, p. 129). Halberstam challenges feminists to:
Refuse the choices offered – freedom in liberal terms of death – in order to think about a shadow archive of resistance, one that does not speak the language of action and momentum but instead articulates itself in terms of evacuation, refusal, passivity, unbecoming, unbeing. (2011, p. 129) (my italics)
Halberstam’s rejection of the language of action and momentum is reminiscent of Baraitser’s critique of the dialectic of the promise and failure of movement. Claiming that queer performativity is a creative and transformative political force, Bunch (2013) argues for a becoming that is also an unbecoming and is not only tied to affirmative representations of identity. She asks:
How does this experience of being ‘unbecoming’ counter oppressive social regimes? … Being unbecoming potentially not only alters subjectivity, it also alters the very law that hails the subject into being. For this reason the ‘un’ of unbecoming does not signify purely negative abjection, but also a creative and transformative politics of becoming…it is in this space of undecidability that the possibilities for political transformation emerge. (2013, p. 40)
I am wary of overstating the political potential for this oscillation between becoming and unbecoming, as Bunch claims, “Unbecoming subjects are thus ideologically powerful, but often vulnerable in material reality” (2013, p. 46). Mother/artists are vulnerable in that their status as artists has shifted due to matrescence. There is a new interdependence with their child/children as they navigate new challenges of time and the responsibilities of care-giving. [Note 7] It is on this threshold, the ‘space of undecidability’ that experiences of matrescence teeter.
If becoming mother provokes an unbecoming of the previously known self, a sense of unbeing, or being undone, how can performance as an “embodied, relational and durational” form provide a site for enacting this becoming and unbecoming? (Šimić & Underwood-Lee, 2021). Parker-Starbuck argues that performance is itself a becoming: “Never fully fixed, open to new alliances, and mutually dependent upon its components, performance is an obvious arena for experiencing and exploring becomings” (2006, p. 651). I will now turn to the performance examples to unpack what new insights might emerge from these specific choreographies of matrescence during COVID-19.
Laura Bradshaw: Matrescence
Bradshaw’s Matrescence (2022), produced in collaboration with Monika Smekot and the Glasgow-based mother’s singing group Thula Mama, is a site-specific dance film displayed over two screens as a diptych. The work was originally presented where it was filmed: East Pollockshields Quad, a small green space situated in an area between tenement flats in the South Side of Glasgow. [Note 8] This quad, which has a few trees, grass, some well-used plastic children’s toys and a rickety wooden climbing frame with balance beams that has been constructed by locals out of pieces of wood, is importantly the site where Thula Mama singers met weekly during the months of the COVID-19 pandemic when this was permissible, for one hour of outdoor communal singing one meter apart from each other.
Bradshaw indicated that it felt impossible to contain the vulnerable and intimate choreographies of matrescence to one screen, and that the diptych form holds the complexity and duality of the experiences of “I” and “mother-me.” Numerous fades to black and oscillating perspectives between the screens visually conveys a sense of maternal time, of the multiple and repeated interruptions of motherhood, the “again and again” which punctures the mother’s self-experience (Baraitser, 2009, p. 67). Close visual crops of gestures such as stroking a child’s leg or “shoosh-jiggling” (using sound and movement to try to settle them) are juxtaposed with wider shots of the quad space featuring mothers in the distance, then closer shots of hands entwined, and a mother breastfeeding. The performers wear similar red tracksuit tops and blue trousers, making them, at times, indistinguishable from one another. We see mothers together, holding one another, chasing each other, moving in unison as they sway while carrying their children. They are also witnessed alone. Sometimes a child is in the shot, but the mother is engaged in her own action, arms wrapped around her body, hugging tightly (fig. 3).
Fig. 3: Screenshot from Laura Bradshaw Matrescence, Tramways Beyond Walls, 10-minute diptych film, 6-8pm 31st August 2022, Pollokshields East Quad, Glasgow. Image credit: Scrimshaw Projects/Monika Smekot
Matrescence opens and closes with song. The women have formed a community around the act of singing together, so, though we do not see them engage in this in the film, the work is bookended by the women’s voices. All Shall Be Well opens the first scene on the quad and then the choral work Land On Shore (The Parting Song) accompanies the final scenes of the mothers and their children and also one performer alone, acknowledging that not every pregnancy results in the birth of a child. [Note 9]
Now my friends
Sisters
I will hold you
Carrying in my in my in my heart (Matrescence, 07:24)
Frequently, the language of the text (“holding, carrying, rocking”…) is performed by the woman in the quad. The audio text refers to the site in which the women have gathered, the same site in which audiences watch the dual films as children play in the background. There is a sense of secrecy conveyed through the voiceover of mother’s voices: “Nobody really saw us,” of the site providing a sanctuary for the mothers and children to gather; “We were enclosed by the space” (Matrescence, 01:30).
The audio text continually lists questions evoking the sense of the social performance of motherhood. Framed by Rich as “the institution of motherhood” (1976, p. 34) and by Phillips as “the motherhood plot” (2022, p. 12), the societal expectations and conventions surrounding the role of new mothers are performed through the lists of constant questions, often around the identity of the new mother, with no acknowledgement that she may be struggling with these seismic shifts; the impact of the “catastrophe of identity” that Kristeva argues occurs through the maternal (1985; p. 134).
Are you a mother?
Is that what you call yourself?
What do you do?
What is your job?
What was your job?
Are you a mother?
Is that what you would call yourself?
How are you adjusting to this?
Is it your first time?
Have you had a miscarriage?
Is it your first time? (Matrescence, 01:59).
The questions become more personal and invasive, prying about the physical and emotional health of the mother:
Did you lie on your postnatal depression questionnaire?
How’s your pelvic floor?
Your nipples?
Your diet?
Your sleep?
Your sex life?
Your sense of identity? (Matrescence, 03:19).
The dances the mothers perform have a quotidian quality. The participants, apart from Bradshaw, are non-professional performers, but the movement quality of the sequences, both solo and ensemble capture the gestures, patterns, and repetitions of early motherhood as the actions of carrying a child, settling it, playing, become choreographic gestures. These are framed as “everyday duets” between parent and baby. One of these duets between lead artist Bradshaw and her youngest son provides a moment where mother and child mirror each other across the separate screens, their bodies moving in the same upward arc, one arm out to the side, striding forward, both of their bodies facing towards the camera. Here, there is a sense of the blueprint of the child in the mother, the mimetic resonance between their physicality, different in scale but recognizable as familial as they perform the same action. In another section, Bradshaw’s eldest son uses a mobility aid as he walks alongside his mother. Their movements are not the same, but still in sync as they navigate the foliage-lined path to the quad.
The metronome of the repeated word “Now” (Matrescence, 03:59) brings us back to the present moment, what Baraitser has identified in her theory of maternal subjectivity as a physical viscosity, “a renewed temporal awareness where the present is elongated and the past and future no longer felt to be so tangible, and a renewed sense of oneself as a speaking subject” (2009, p. 4). Some objects recur throughout the film: brightly colored toys including a slide, a rocking horse, and a boat big enough for a small child. These are used in multiple ways as transformable objects, not just by the children who play on them in many scenes, but also by the mothers. The slide when upturned becomes an unlikely maypole, allowing the performers to move in circles leaning their bodies outward and balancing each other. At one point the toys are thrown across the quad with rage, then are picked up and tidied away by other performers, restoring order to the space.
While the camera allows for a sense of being simultaneously close and at a distance, visible yet obscured, moving and still, the audio text also conveys this:
A sense of splitting
Being hidden
The visible/invisible
Gently and viscerally being revealed
During different moments
Then hidden away again (Matrescence, 06:34)
In this section of text, the subjective split between the person and her mother-self is explored. In becoming mother, something has been lost; there has been a fragmentation of the self, which culminates in both a desire to be invisible, to be “the moss on the tree trunk, quietly doing the important work” (Matrescence, 07:04) but also to be seen. Putnam acknowledges:
what is not presented or made visible—the hidden time that is endured in the gaps, glitches, noise, and lag. Thus, an analysis of rupture requires supplementation with unbecoming time, or consideration of what is excluded or erased. (2022, p.77)
The literal schism between the screens, the oscillation between perspectives and the use of blackouts enact becoming and unbecoming through images, texts and choreographies. Putnam’s “unbecoming time” is the time between the filmic cuts, the moments that were edited out, or simply not captured by the camera. These invisible instants of unbecoming time act as a counterpoint to the action we do see, the moments of mother-becoming which the film conveys.
There is ambiguity about whether the ‘I’ is hidden inside or on the outside of the mother/mother-me:
I come and the mother comes
Or the mother-me comes and I come too
I am hidden inside
Or I am on the outside
And the mother is hidden inside (Matrescence, 06:49,”
In her chapter “Pregnant embodiment: Subjectivity and alienation,” Young conceives of pregnancy as a condition in which the mother is doubled in both her subjectivity and her experience of time (2005 [1990]). This sense of a split between Quinn’s “I-was” and “I-am,” and the liminality of this experience, is further explored through Smekot’s camera work. The multiplicity of angles and perspectives on the site, the foliage, the undergrowth, the trees and bins are frequently seen through gaps in the wooden structures built for the children to play on. Structures are rickety, and the piles of bricks precarious.
The final text offers an image of a feral motherhood, of a break from the captivity of the expectations of motherhood to become-an animal, a mother pig suckling her young:
Lying on my side
In a half sleep
And my body becomes a sow’s
A little piglet is rooting at my breast
Seeking comfort and nourishment
His little feet kick my soft belly
And his hands claw at my skin
I succumb (Matrescence, 07:47)
I argue that this succumbing is also a becoming, an acceptance of the transformation that is in process. Succumbing to this moment of stillness provides a contrast to the movement of the film, to the constant coming and going that has occurred. There is a sense that through feeding her child, their bodies become one, and metamorphose into something other, that the mother has not only succumbed to the child, but has once again become part of the same being:
My body becomes his body
Stretching and finding my limbs
I am inside his body
Or we have overlapped
Merged, become each other
I am you
And you are you
I don’t think that you are me (Matrescence, 08:38)
There is a questioning of what becomes of the mother’s body after this nurturing of the child is over: “And later/What will my body become?/An old home/A once familiar beast/A pillar/An occasional refuge?” (Matrescence, (09:02). The final text is frequently interrupted by the sound of a child. Both visually and aurally, Matrescence conveys the quotidian and repeated choreographies of new motherhood, performed on the site where the new mothers gathered during lockdown.
Bradshaw’s Matrescence and Stephanie Black-Daniels’ Position & attachment both utilize two channels, a diptych of films presented side by side and on a loop, conveying the repetitive, ongoing, never completed tasks of motherhood. [Note 10] In Enduring time (2017), Baraitser returns to the idea of time that she explored through Maternal encounters: The ethics of interruption (2009). She states:
We may not experience ourselves as flows and ebbs and intensities. We are mediums for these things, for sure, but the affective experience of living in chronic time is not one, I would suggest, of becoming. (2017, p. 96)
Bariaster develops her Ethics of interruption to include a more nuanced analysis of maternal time including “temporal tropes that are linked together by an apparent lack of dynamism or movement: waiting, staying, delaying, enduring, persisting, repeating, maintaining, preserving and remaining” (2017, p. 13). As well as conveying maternal time, Position & attachment also offers a critique of how breastfeeding mothers engage with space, informed by Lesley Kern’s The feminist city (2021).
Stephanie Black-Daniels: “Position & Attachment”
The title Position & attachment is drawn from medical reports on pregnancy, birth and recovery and relates to breastfeeding protocol. This phrase employed by medical professionals refers to the “position and attachment” of how the baby is held at the nipple when feeding. In the UK breastfeeding is encouraged with NHS classes delivered as part of the antenatal provision for expectant mothers. “Position & Attachment” included a two channel film and performance installation presented as a diptych, two print works (PL and AR), and an installation of superclad debris netting (a material used to protect scaffolding) (fig.4), hung across the space, dividing the light entrance and the dark space where the films were playing on a loop. The prints were situated at the entrance of the gallery and visually depict the left and right feed when breastfeeding. The images were generated by collecting data in feeding (e.g., action, duration, terminology, weight of milk, etc.), which was translated into instructions for printing. Black-Daniels marked the white and black paper by undertaking performative actions to pull the ink repeatedly onto it. [Note 11] The recurrent choreography of the “pulls” used in the printmaking process also mirrors the film in “Position & Attachment.” The diameter of the sphere represents the duration of the corresponding film channel. The cycle of gestures of pulling the ink through the screenprint mesh created sixteen one-off prints (eight of each side in white and black). It is through the technique of screen printing physically performed by the artist that generated the prints which relate to the cycles of both feeds side-by-side.
Fig. 4. Stephanie Black-Daniels, Position & Attachment, film, prints and installation, presented by Collective on the Hillside, Edinburgh, 17 Sep 2022 — 20 Nov 2022. Images by Sally Jubb, courtesy of Collective.
The dual films are of the artist’s body, wearing a black jumpsuit, dark hair pulled into a tight bun, performing repetitive gestures with her hands, clasped in front of her, knuckles visible, moving forward and back in swooping circles. Black-Daniels’ hands are stark as they perform a choreography of abstracted patting, lifting gestures, an empty space where the baby might have been between her hands and her chest. No child features in the film work, but the actions are performed as though they have been repeated frequently and are remembered through the body. The camera takes us closer, intimate enlarged shots of the fastener on a black body feeding bra, the unhooking, then the bra strap seen from the back, an indent in her shoulder where the strap has been. The body is marked by this apparatus for breastfeeding (fig. 5).
Fig. 5. Stephanie Black-Daniels, “Position & Attachment,” film, prints and installation, presented by Collective on the Hillside, Edinburgh, 17 Sep 2022 — 20 Nov 2022. Images by Sally Jubb, courtesy of Collective.
The artist’s facial expressions move from peaceful to angst-ridden, content, then bored, frustrated, then blank, conveying a sense of the contradictions of maternal subjectivity. Her body is always moving, rocking, swishing, arms circling carefully then furiously. A sheen of sweat is visible on her face. Subtle stretch marks on the breast are traces of the bodily changes of motherhood. Her breath sounds alongside the repetitive and rhythmic sound of the cello.
The work was informed by a group of breastfeeding mothers who shared experiences of feeding babies in public spaces during lockdown. [Note 12] This research group was organised by Black-Daniels who contacted other mother/artists in her local area. Rowan Lear writes: “Nursing in urban spaces remains culturally transgressive even while it is a care-giving necessity and not a choice for many people” (Lear, 2022). The message that ‘breast is best’ alongside societal taboos around breastfeeding in public spaces can put pressure on new mothers.
The artist worked with collaborator and architect Nick O’Neill from aaltspace architects to explore the binaries of architectural space and structures (which informed the performance installation and material). They were interested in concepts of left and right, masculine and feminine, safe and dangerous, open and closed, domestic and public, as well as the threshold spaces in between. I would argue that the films also evoke concepts of becoming and unbecoming through the fluctuations between the gestures and actions of early motherhood performed in the absence of the child. During their collaboration, Black-Daniels and O’Neill walked through the city together, discussing town planning, boundaries, accessibility and materials. The artist’s experience of trying to feed her child while in the urban environment is alluded to through the scaffolding netting drapery which divides the gallery space. Matthews (2019) argues, that“The practice of urban breastfeeding is wrapped up with power and visuality” and the act of feeding a child in spaces that have been “developed for the maintenance of particular kinds of bodies” (Lear, 2022) is an act of rebellion in itself. Šimić and Underwood-Lee argue that “The mother figure is one of rebellion too… Mothers can be conflicted and ambivalent, bored and frustrated” (2021, p. 139). Black-Daniels’ work holds some of this ambivalence, its discontent and restlessness, through the repetitive movement and unending action.
Becoming/Unbecoming Together
Both artists undertook a research phase with a group of non-performers: Bradshaw collaborated with a community she was part of – the Thula Mama singing collective- and Black-Daniels worked with a group of breastfeeding mothers. These communities of those experiencing matrescence can also be spaces to explore unbecoming, to share what has been lost or is not possible, to empathize with and support each other. An important part of the creative work became talking about the unbecoming parts of becoming a mother: the difficulties, anxieties, and ways in which COVID-19 restrictions were making the already isolating experience of motherhood even more so. Communal spaces of conversation and a shared activity, singing and breastfeeding respectively, are explored in the outdoors. The reasons for this were multiple: partly due to the restrictions in place for Thula Mama, but also to do with the desire to be out of the house, which provoked questions about how to navigate the urban landscape as a breastfeeding mother.
The sites where these works were shown are also significant: Matrescence was presented in the quad where the performances had been filmed; “Position & Attachment“was shown in Collective’s gallery on Edinburgh’s Hillside, where audiences had to climb the hill then were met with a panoramic view of the city before entering the space. That these viewing spaces were accessible and open to parents and children was also vital. One of the barriers to seeing art as a mother are the times of performances which often take place in the evenings which can be a challenge with the dinner, bath, bedtime routine of those caring for children – as critiqued by artist Lynn Lu in response to the timing of the AHRC maternal performance panel she was asked to give at 7pm. [Note 13] The films were on a loop which meant a flexibility in the time when people could attend, and the sites of both works were free and mainly accessible to those with children.
On the evening of the film’s premiere in Pollockshields Quad, children playing on the wooden structure and with communal toys provided a backdrop to the same activities presented in the film’s content. While Black-Daniels’ films were sited within a gallery space, the door was open, and the sectioning of the space meant that some attendees who needed to feed babies while watching the work were able to do so. On the opening night of “Position & Attachment,“ there was a queue of prams with children running around the gallery space. That children were welcome at these artworks made the events not only about disseminating experiences of mother/artists and their communities during lockdown, but intended for mothers, parents and families. The form (looped films with flexible start times), the sites (accessible spaces that were family-friendly and informal), and the ability to move in and out with no expectation of silence, stasis, or other conventions of theatre spaces meant they were able to be more accessible for mothers and young children.
Conclusion: Becoming/Unbecoming Again
Ahmed claims “We become retrospective witnesses of our becoming” (2017, p. 32) inviting an acknowledgement that sometimes the changes that occur are only seen when looking back. The performances I have analyzed provide digital glimpses into a particular moment in the lives of these mother/artists and communities of those experiencing matrescence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Parker-Starbuck argues:, “Becomings are provocative; they offer a challenge for us to be something new, something beyond skin, beyond a fixed sense of self” (Parker-Starbuck, 2006, p. 651). Becomings are provocative, as are unbecomings. In becoming something new, something is lost, the “I-was” and the “I-am” (Quinn, 2012) rub against each other in not always comfortable ways. Phillips claims that parenthood can feel “chaotic in all its self-loss and self-discovery” (2022, p. 15) but I argue that it is in this transitional and fluid state that a new creative maternal subjectivity can emerge. These performances to camera, made with and for communities of people experiencing matrescence – a mother becoming – visually convey this schism through the visual form of diptych film. This oscillation between multiple and synchronous versions of motherhood shows a maternal subjectivity that cannot be contained in one screen. The digital interruptions of the black outs, shifts in perspectives from closely cropped to wide-angled shots, and the layering of images provide aesthetic textures and linguistic descriptions which convey elements of both becoming and unbecoming. Putnam’s “unbecoming time” (2021, p. 77) points to the invisible labor of the making of these works for camera. This includes collaboration, facilitation, production, filming, editing, the negotiation of the site, its curation, and importantly, the childcare and community support needed to make the work. This hidden time remains invisible.
Maternal performance: Feminist relations ends with the sentiment that “Maternal performance is primarily about openings, endless possibility, the refusal of endings. The maternal is always about new beginnings” (Šimić & Underwood-Lee, 2021, p. 226). To conclude I defer a point of arrival, instead suggesting that the fluctuation between becoming and unbecoming continues. Matrescence evolves – I was a mother to an infant, now I am a mother to a four-year-old – I am still becoming a mother. Philips says “She is transformed over and over by it. Throughout her life. Her acts of self-creation and self-revision are her story” (2022, p. 17). Performance can be a site of exploring, expanding and disseminating identities and experiences. As well as enacting the individual artist’s becomings/unbecomings that matrescence provoked, these works also instigated a coming together. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, these mother/artists have also demonstrated that in the most difficult of circumstances, it is also a place of community.
This work was presented at the MoM Conference with the support of a Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Athenaeum Award.
Notes
[1] I use the term matrescence rather than parturition as not all people who become mothers go through childbirth and the terms maternal and motherhood have the potential to essentialise and ostracise (Šimić & Underwood-Lee, 2016: 6). Although not discussed explicitly in this article, same sex couples, trans women, women who adopt a child or use a surrogate may not go through childbirth but can experience matrescence.
[2] The idea of ‘Unbecoming Mothers’ has been explored by photographer and photo therapist Jo Spence in a series of photographic works of that name (1989) and also in a book exploring the psychology and sociology of absent mothers: Unbecoming mothers: The social production of maternal absence (2005) edited by Diana Gustafson, (New York: Routledge).
[3] The term “mother/artist” is framed by Šimić & Underwood-Lee (2021) and was employed by Eti Wade (2016) and Andrea Liss (2009). They acknowledge that the term “mother/artists” “functions as an empowerment of a statement as well as a strategic outcry, similar to the way in which Ukeles proclaimed her own position as an artist, woman, wife, mother’”(Šimić & Underwood-Lee, 2021, 8)
[4] Julia Bueno discusses the concept of the child in mind in her book about pregnancy loss: On the brink of being: Talking about miscarriage (2019). I want to acknowledge that those whose pregnancy does not result in the birth of a child also experience matrescence and Laura Bradshaw’s Matrescence includes experiences of pregnancy loss within the work.
[5] Artists such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Lena Šimić, Emily Underwood-Lee, Aine Phillips, Grace Surman, Helena Walshe, Helen Sargent, Jodie Hawkes, Elena Marchevska, Lynn Lu and others have expanded the field of maternal performance. I have chosen to focus on artists working in response to the COVID-19 pandemic for this analysis as a new mode of maternal performance-making.
[6] Braidotti argues that Deleuze uses his theory of becoming-woman as the basis for a critique of identity-based feminist politics. She states: “All transformative politics should be about becoming-minor and to dissolve the subject ‘woman’ into a series of processes geared towards a generalised and ‘gender-free’ becoming” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 350).This echoes Judith Butler who claims in Undoing gender, that the emphasis must shift from becoming to “becoming undone” as a way of undoing ‘restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life’ (2004:, p. 1).
[7] This was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic as discussed by Katherine Nolan in “Life on Pause: Entanglements of The Maternal and the Mortal in a Global Pandemic” (2021), Bissell, Laura and Lucy Weir (eds.) Performance in a pandemic, London: Routledge.
[8] Matrescence was presented on 31st August 2022 as part of Tramway’s Beyond Walls programme. The 10 minute film was on a loop between 6-8pm.
[9] All Shall Be Well is a traditional British folk song originally based on a statement by Julian of Norwich. Land on Shore is an American farewell song which may have originally been a Shaker hymn but has also been sung in the British Isles.
[10] “Position & Attachment” was presented by Collective on the Hillside, Edinburgh, 17 Sep 2022 — 20 Nov 2022.
[11] The works are described by the artist as: PL, screenprint on Somerset Black Velvet Printmaking paper (280gsm) in an edition of 8, image size 42 x 59.4 cm, 2022. PL, defined as “Position Left” by the artist, in response to the positioning of the body and manmade medical terminology during the feeding process i.e. breastfeeding/ body feeding AR, screenprint on Somerset Soft white Velvet Printmaking paper (300gsm) in an edition of 8, image size 42 x 59.4 cm, 2022. AR, defined as “Attachment Right” by the artist, in response to the positioning of the body and man-made medical terminology during the feeding process i.e. breastfeeding/ body feeding.
[12] The term “breastfeeding” was discussed by this group who claimed this but also acknowledged other experiences of body feeding or chest feeding.
[13] Performance and the Maternal was an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project led by the University of South Wales (Cardiff) and Edge Hill University (Ormskirk) between November 2019 and May 2021: https://performanceandthematernal.com/
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