The women breaking down art’s final taboo: motherhood

Can you be a great artist and a mother? This is the question being posed by a new exhibition exploring art and motherhood. Chloe Ashby talks to the stars of ‘Acts of Creation’ who are making work about the maternal gaze, showing parents that it’s not just about ‘doing it all’, you can ‘paint it all’ too...

Paula Rego, ‘Untitled 2’, 1999, Courtesy Cristea Roberts Gallery (Cristea Roberts Gallery)

When British artist Catherine Elwes had a baby in 1983, she soon discovered she was expected to keep her motherhood hidden. Nowhere in Oxford would permit her to publicly breastfeed; no cafe, cinema or restaurant. Oddly enough, the one place that allowed it was a gallery. But at the same time, if she walked into any newsagent and looked up at the top shelf, she would find plenty of bare breasts in Penthouse, Playboy and other magazines. “That was the only sanctioned form of exposure of the female breast, for the pleasure of male sexual desire, not in its biological mode,” she tells me. “So, I decided to make an image of lactation that avoids both.”

There is a Myth (1984), which captures a suckling baby off-camera and stars, instead, the breast not being fed on, receiving tiny punches from a tiny hand, droplets of milk flowing from the nipple, is one of more than 100 works included in Acts of Creation. Opening at the Arnolfini in Bristol this weekend before touring to Birmingham, Sheffield and Dundee, the exhibition explores the pleasures, pains, hopes and anxieties of motherhood, and brings together artists making work during the past 60 years.

“The show came out of a study I did on artist mothers in 2019,” says the curator Hettie Judah, who’s also an art critic and author, and co-founder of the Art Working Parents Alliance. “It became evident that there was this huge taboo around art that looked at motherhood, which was seen as an unspeakable subject, and that the artist mother as a cultural paradigm wasn’t visible. So, the exhibition was conceived to address these two things: to suggest that motherhood can be a great subject for art, and to show that lots of people are parents and artists, that it’s not impossible.”