Art of Parenting

Making art while raising children can be challenging, but a new show offers some creative strategies.

by

Being an artist and a parent can sometimes feel impossible. 

From this place of joy, rage, love and impatience, comes The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom, on view at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in Vancouver until April 5. The exhibition features 10 artists whose strategies for balancing art and parenthood spill out in performance, drawing, installation and film.

The double duty of parenting and art making comes with considerable juggling and the occasional tantrum – by the artist. But sometimes it’s as simple as involving your kids in the project. 

Claire Greenshaw reproduced her children’s drawings in exacting and exquisite detail. A pencil crayon drawing titled oo recalls a moment of early language acquisition by her son. The double letters, rendered in a fleshy pink hue, resemble a blood smear. They capture the strange combination of love and frustration parents will instantly recognize. 

Ottawa artist Maura Doyle’s pots, blackened and listing sideways, but possessed of stolid determination, recall the looks on parents’ faces after long days and longer nights of childcare. 

Her work takes inspiration from ordinary objects – canned vegetables or a bottle of dish soap – recasting these quotidian forms in clay. The result is a transmutation in which everyday things escape their homey origins. 

The process is not without suffering, however, as the sooty exteriors reveal. As a baptism of fire, parenting is not unlike barrel firing, an ancient form of ceramic making that results in works like Pot Experiments and Who the Pot? 

Humble materials are found in Vancouver artist Steven Brekelmans’ work. The Gift / The Climb / The Curse (Billiard Table) uses toothpicks, modelling clay and stained glass, the kind you could buy in a kit, to create witty eviscerations of artistic pretension. The work reverberates with a frisson of incongruity in the cool setting of the gallery, as it questions concepts of high and low culture.

A similar form of cognitive dissonance pops up in Vancouver artist Brady Cranfield’s drawing Slack Motherfucker, which takes inspiration from American indie rock band Superchunk’s song of the same title. With the most mundane of materials, a pen and a white wall, Cranfield creates work that throbs with sullen energy. Like something you might find in a bathroom stall or amongst the marginalia in a teenager’s math book, it’s snarling and snotty, but also funny. 

Other pieces, like Turkish-born Vancouver artist Damla Tamer’s Divination Objects or Toronto artist Annie MacDonell’s Book of Hours, use subtler methods, interweaving ideas and experiences into works that ask viewers to look more closely at issues of money, space and time. In her weavings, Tamer employs traditional ikat, a dyeing technique for patterned textiles, to metaphorically evoke employment precarity, pedagogical demands and new motherhood. MacDonell combines performance and film to question ideas around creative labour.  

Performance figures large throughout the show, whether in reference to American experimental choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s film Lives of Performers, played out in MacDonell’s family home, or in Justine A. Chambers’ choreographic work, which employs Rainer’s concept of pedestrian movement. Chambers’ performance piece And then this also explores the frustration and impossibility of being in two places at once. As she says: “My studio is the public bus.”

Erica Stocking, whose work provides the show’s title, uses performance to embody the intertwined roles of artist and parent, not to mention cook, cleaner, driver and all-round general dogsbody. Costumes that would look at home in a Marimekko boutique use dazzle camouflage, a form of black and white graphics, to provide an entry point into domestic drama. Performative parenting, you might call it.

In looking for strategies to combine creativity and parenting, older artists offer some interesting lessons. Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley, who make up the Montreal-based partnership Leisure, use British artist Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures as a leaping-off place for Conversations with Magic Forms. 

Hepworth, who gave birth to triplets in 1934, had a studio next door to Piet Mondrian. It’s fun to imagine three small children wreaking havoc with his precise work. With this chaotic joyful energy in mind, Magic Forms lets kids make their own art and have it displayed in the gallery. 

And thus, another creative generation is born. ■

The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom is on view at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver from Jan. 24 to April 5, 2020.

PS: Worried you missed something? See previous Galleries West  stories here or sign up for our free biweekly newsletter.

.

Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver.jpg

Contemporary Art Gallery

555 Nelson Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6B 6R5

604-681-2700

please enable javascript to view

Visit Website

Tues to Sun noon - 6 pm