Art Mamas

A Vancouver collective for artists who juggle parenting helps counter the art world’s tendency to sideline young mothers.

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Themes of motherhood have always figured prominently in Western art. But it has rarely been created by actual mothers or reflected the rich and arduous experiences associated with the creation and nurturing of a new human being. Even today, artists who embrace parenthood may find it hard to access the same opportunities, especially when their children are young.

“It's much more difficult to be taken as a serious professional if you are also taking time off to raise children,” says Vancouver artist and mother Heather Passmore. “There are real structural constraints on your ability to produce work.

“People take time off for sabbaticals, to travel, or to get a degree, but taking time off to engage in something that builds character and deepens your knowledge, such as motherhood, is not valued in the same way. The assumption is that you won’t continue with your work because you won’t have time. But pregnancy itself raises all the biggest questions we know how to ask, things that relate deeply to religion and philosophy.”

Passmore is a member of Art Mamas, a Vancouver collective of nine artists at different stages of both their careers and motherhood. Since 2016, they’ve been getting together to create community, offer critiques and generally support each other. Discussions range widely from new creative directions and possible collaborations, to history, politics and sundry personal matters.

Such groups are popping up across Canada as a new generation of women, one influenced by earlier feminism but also by recent societal shifts, moves through the reproductive years. Galleries too, particularly artist-run centres, are increasingly looking at the relationship between being an artist and the unrelenting emotional labour that’s involved in nurturing a child.

Time constraints hinder us all to some measure. Raising kids? Tenfold, especially in the first crucial years. Passmore, mother to a preschooler, is clear about the impact it has on her choices.

“I need to focus on projects that I can stop and start very easily,” she says. “If I’m combining childcare with art making, I need to be working on projects where I can be interrupted constantly.”

Even bigger challenges await caregivers who work on large-scale, big-budget projects, like film and installation. If you don’t come from money or have a supportive family backstop, your options are limited.

Another member of Art Mamas, Matilda Aslizadeh, a single parent to a school-age daughter, creates multi-screen video installations. Almost at a feature-film scale, they take months to produce, and tackle a broad array of issues, including leisure, class and conflict.

Her three-channel video installation, Resort, plays out in a walled-in idyll that is protected from the conflicts of the outside world, but contains dramas within that feature a mother as protagonist. On the more formal side is a video installation called Moly and Kassandra, which blends the abstraction of economic data with operatic performance. It was shown at last year’s Contact photo festival through her Toronto gallery, Pari Nadimi.

Given that the art world loves a steady stream of citable exhibitions, adding parenting into the mix can mean more intermittent exhibitions, a liability in the pursuit of grants and professional accolades.

"When you’re a new mother, especially, there are very concrete challenges to participating in the art community,” says Aslizadeh. “It’s not always viable to participate in openings, talks and other events, or generally integrate family life into the things you need to do as a professional artist.

“There’s no childcare or any way to involve your children in events. It doesn’t have to be that way. All they need to do is hire one extra volunteer to watch the kids. Sometimes, it would be nice just to not get sneers when you bring a child into that space.”

Passmore is determined to set an example, and says the Art Mamas find ways to include their kids, not only at their meetings but at openings and even panel discussions, as long as they're before bedtime.

Work that connects directly and intimately with the visceral side of motherhood, such as breastfeeding, can be a tough sell.

This is where Passmore steps in, taking her lead from a morality tale from antiquity known as Roman Charity. In it, a woman named Pero saves her father from starvation in prison by secretly breastfeeding him.

Passmore’s works tackle two fronts: one addresses societal discomfort via portraits of breastfeeding women, their heads covered, in timeless traditional poses. The other presents joyous patterns created with paint made with outdated breast milk she would otherwise discard. The paintings, including a triptych titled Roman Charity, seek to evoke a sense of repetition and the passage of time.

“I’m incorporating breast milk into my paint recipe” says Passmore. “It’s a traditional process that produces an archival material that permanently binds to rigid porous surfaces like wood panels … It’s such a precious material. It’s important both biologically and as a representation of all the labour that goes into raising children.”

The collective also includes Robyn Laba, prOphecy sun, Gabriela Aceves, Damla Tamer, Natasha McHardy, Maria Anna Parolin and Sarah Shamash.

At this month's meeting at Shamash's studio, the conversation ranged widely, providing a break from the daily grind. Shamash, a media artist and mother of a preschooler, was poring over a newly acquired collection of 35mm slides from UBC. The discarded teaching images of Western art, many still in aluminum frames, may find new life sewn together into a garment.

Some members of the Art Mamas are making inroads with exhibitions. Passmore, who will show next year at the Vernon Public Art Gallery in the B.C. Interior, has exhibited recently at the White Water Gallery, an artist-run centre in North Bay, Ont., and at Harcourt House, an artist-run centre in Edmonton. Aslizadeh has exhibited at various artist-run centres and was included last year in a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto.

Aslizadeh sums up her feelings: “I hope when people see our work they’ll have a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be a parent and that parenting and art making are laborious processes that can nourish each other, rather than being seen as at odds with one another.” ■