‘Things In-Between’: Digital Exhibitions, ‘Pandemic Time’ & Motherhood

by: Rebecca Louise-Clarke , November 19, 2024

When my daughter was first born, my 6-year-old nephew, meeting her for the first time, said ‘she’s a bit like you, a bit like her Dad and a bit like… herself.’ Finding his own observation absurd he broke out in laughter, but I think he was right. And as I watch my daughter grow, the truth of his innocent comment grows in strength, complexity and nuance.

When she was still in my belly and her birth grew nearer, I felt panic when I pictured the hospital and its imagined terrors. As we neared birth time, and her weight dropped into my pelvis, she felt so heavy that each step was punctuated with pain. Her presence felt suddenly more distinct, her person (whomever she was, or would come to be) became as vivid and matter of fact as the sky above me. I had the sensation of her looking back at me and felt a sense of her reassurance, like a pat on the back and a murmur ‘don’t worry.’ Her movement as steady as a kick drum inside me. I knew her; strong willed, certain in her opinions, a dancer, a leader. These characteristics have come to transpire. Who can say whether or not it was due to her natural inclinations or through my own tending? Or perhaps, as my nephew had alluded: a bit of all of it. In that moment, what was, what is, and what was to come swam together in a new temporality.

The experience of becoming a mother and the practice of mothering has made conventional understandings of life as a straight line, as a linear series of progressive events, downright laughable. In Alison Bartlett’s essay on the strange temporality experienced in early mothering, the mother and theorist fleetingly throws out a provocation: that perhaps the early ‘daze’ of parenting qualifies as an alternative state that has its own ‘temporality, ontology and epistemology.’ ‘Perhaps,’ Bartlett queries, ‘drugs and the divine are the only ways we have so far to talk about such alternate states’ (2010: 130-131). Mothering happens all the time, it’s true. So why is maternal subjectivity—particularly maternal temporality—such an underrepresented area of inquiry? In this article, I attempt to find answers to this complex question. This article arose out of my PhD project in Curatorial Studies, ‘Mother Stuff: Finding a museology of mothering’ (Monash University 2023), in which I studied mother-related collections at museums to imagine a set of curatorial strategies to help museums articulate experiences of mothering. In my research, I identified a problem in museums: the invisibility of mothers’ labour and experiences. My project’s aim was to bring more visibility to the role mothers have played in history by asking: how can we represent the inner world of mothers in museum collections and programs? My research was practice-led, involving much reflection on my own practice both as a mother and as a curator.

In my early parenting, when I began my research, I realised that no one had prepared me for the unique psychological transition of motherhood. For decades the public has been enthralled by the intricate details of the psychological effects of mescaline, mushrooms, LSD, and of lethal soups of drug allsorts in tales of psychedelic journeys in literature and cinema. Examples include Hunter S. Thompsons’ book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and its film adaptation (1998), and in detailed tell-all books and films about The Beatles’ drug induced ‘lost weekends’ (2022). And yet, in early parenting I wondered if anyone else knew what it felt like to be breastfeeding in the night on no sleep, while The Wiggles’ song, ‘Do the Propeller’ went round in my head. When I came to after birthing my daughter, I thought it bizarre that I had not ever heard anyone talk about the psychedelic, physical, and trauma-inducing ‘trip’ of labour. Mothering has produced in me many mind-altering and physical effects, most too hard to articulate or define. But the closest analogy I can find is that it has made me into something of a time traveller. In this article, I ask: What kinds of narratives might best express the inner worlds of mothers? In an analysis of my digital exhibition, Things In-Between (2021), created during one of the many lockdowns in Melbourne, Australia, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I seek the tools for a ‘museology of mothering’ and argue for the re-consideration of the role of time in museum narratives.

Mother Stuff: finding a Museology of mothering

In my practice-led research, ‘Mother Stuff: Finding a Museology of Mothering’ I aimed to devise a set of practices for what I call a ‘museology of mothering.’ To resist heteronormative paradigms, I use the term ‘mothering’ to encompass lived experiences of parenting that are not exclusively tied to sex, gender, or the maternal body, whilst still acknowledging that cultural expectations about women and femininity have significant impacts on experiences of mothering. As I will explore throughout this article, my conceptualisation of mothering as a practice is informed by Andrea O’Reilly’s (2008) matricentric feminism.

As a curator and writer, I began my research at museums shortly after becoming a mother. My research was ignited by a desire to find histories about motherhood that reached out in a visceral way beyond the stereotypical representations of motherhood that overflowed in public discourse. In my exploration of mother-related museum collections at Museums Victoria (MV) I discovered a wealth of material culture relating to domestic life that had been acquired for its significance to national, historical, and cultural milestones, but I also identified an absence of representations of motherhood as voiced by mothers themselves.

The women’s history movement has done immense work to foreground the importance of women’s histories and to record a history of female oppression, but its task has largely been to illustrate women’s identity and accomplishments beyond their role as mothers (Pascoe Leahy 2019: 3). As a result, in women’s history which tends to focus on public milestones rather than the private realities, lived experiences of motherhood have generally been neglected.

Museology of Mothering

I choose to use the word ‘museology’ to describe the set of curatorial design techniques I am seeking. I use this term because I am trying to articulate a theoretical approach and an assemblage of practical tools that I have established through my curatorial research and practice. I seek a museology, a theory of museum practice that specifically serves the exploration of mothering. It is my aim to devise transformative design considerations and systems for museum practice including collection management and curatorial design.

As a mother I take an autoethnographic approach, one that privileges the maternal voice and embraces the characteristics of my maternal subjectivity. I also take on an autoethnographic approach as a curator, inspired by curatorial activism and curatorial dreaming (Butler 2018), in my analysis of collections, exhibitions and the curatorial experiments that I have designed and created. My borrowing from multiple disciplines and bringing them together initiates a dialogue between disciplines not yet in scholarly discussion with each other: maternal studies and museology.

Matricentric Feminism

The problem I recognised in museum collections: the invisibility of mothers, is not specific only to museums, rather it is reflective of a broader cultural problem—the invisibility of mothers and their subjectivities. In response to this problem, I draw on feminist, Andrea O’Reilly’s (2008) concept of matricentric feminism to argue that unique approaches are required to unravel and challenge the patriarchal institution of motherhood. O’Reilly carved out matricentric feminism, not to replace traditional feminist thought; but rather to emphasise that the category of mother is distinct from the category of woman and that many of the problems that mothers face—social, economic, political, cultural, psychological, and so forth—are ‘specific to women’s role and identity as mothers’ (2021: 2). Matricentric feminism works from the understanding that mothers are oppressed under patriarchy as women and as mothers. Consequently, mothers need a matricentric mode of feminism. Matricentric feminism provides a valuable framework for my argument that narratives about mothers need to speak to and from mothers’ complex, varied and multi-faceted maternal positions.

Maternal Time

They asked me the rudimentary questions: how was she sleeping? And was she feeding enough? These questions seemed impossible to answer. It was so hard to remember what had happened even just an hour earlier, that we had to keep a journal; it tracked each crucial event: sleep, milk, poo.

In my early mothering, time became strange. The every-day rhythm of my life was now subject to the rhythm of my baby. My experiences of temporality in early mothering resonate with maternal scholars’ descriptions of maternal time in which the demarcations between past, present and future are complicated. If we strive to articulate maternal temporalities, linear historical narratives are hardly sufficient. Maternal temporalities need to be explored in order to represent mothering in museums.

The voice of the museum in conventional museum practice is traditionally informed by experts, namely historians, in keeping with the aim of educating the public. I now turn my attention to the ways that historical writing and museum narratives that tend to work within the paradigms of historical writing value tales of progression and unity. In my analysis of my own digital experiments I suggest ways that a museology of mothering can re-consider the role of time in museums narratives. In my discussion of my digital exhibition, Things In-Between, I demonstrate the ways I have complicated historical temporality. As my analysis will show, a museology of mothering can benefit from seeking alternative temporalities to express maternal experiences of time.

Feminist theorists (Browne 2014) have searched for an alternative model of historical time in a search for a feminist historiography; one that is multilinear, and can therefore account for the coexistence of intersecting, parallel trajectories. In their attempts to find new ways of writing histories of feminism in particular, they have argued that methodologies outside of conventional historical writing are required. As feminist historians (Browne 2014; Scott, 1984) have noted in their extensive study of feminist history, the hegemonic model of feminist history relies upon a progressivist concept of historical change through time (Browne 2013). Instead, what is needed, they suggest, is a multidirectional trajectory that can account for the ways in which the past affects the present, and the ways in which present outlooks can affect our relation to the past. This approach would enable understandings of feminist histories in the plural, and therefore encourage more fruitful conversations between feminisms of the past and the present (Browne 2013: 8). Drawing on these suggestions that new methodical approaches are required for writing women’s history, I suggest that specific ones are yet to be found for histories that explore mothering.

Maternal scholars have reflected on the unique nature of time as experienced by mothers and have argued for a consideration of a specific temporality, maternal time. In their descriptions of maternal subjectivity, maternal scholars have suggested that narrative is a form ill-fitting for the subjectivity of mothering. Lisa Baraitser (2008) hails anecdote as the better method by which to talk about maternal subjectivity as she considers it one of the hallmarks of the mindset of mothering. Baraitser describes the child as performing a ‘constant attack on narrative’ (2008: 1-19). The mother’s narrative is ‘punctured at the level of constant interruptions to thinking, reflecting, sleeping, moving and completing tasks’ (2008: 1-19). How then, might such fractured and seemingly incomplete snippets of maternal subjectivity fit in with museum narratives and the historical time they are so often associated with? I argue that a museology of mothering requires first person perspectives that are not strictly bound by linear narrative or narrative structures.

Finding a History of Mothering

Reflecting on the methodologies of historians who have embarked on histories of mothering shows how conventional historical writing can be deeply limiting. Historian Sarah Knott wrote a history of mothering, Mother is a Verb: an Unconventional History (2019) when she herself had just become a mother. I argue that her work, in both its content and form, reveals temporalities specific to mothering.

When Knott undertook a history of motherhood, she felt she had to discover new methodologies. Written in the form of a personal essay, Knott abandons conventional historical narrative and instead weaves the traces of the many mothers’ stories she encounters in her archival research, through reflections on her own mothering. In Knott’s discussion on method, she describes how she found the first-person essay a suitable form for the subject of motherhood. Knott points out that the personal voice has long been reserved for the purpose of framing historical texts, rather than for the body of the historical book. For example, in the tradition of historical writing, personal reflections are used in an introduction to then be put aside for the main analysis; one that is delivered in an authoritarian, seemingly impartial voice (2019: 263-268). Knott describes how history books typically ‘open the door’ to a first-person approach in the framing materials, and then ‘close it’ behind them for the main analysis, which is presented in ‘carefully distanced tones’ (2019: 263). She then goes on to explain that she wanted to take a new approach, to see what might happen when the door is ‘held open from the very beginning to the very end of the book’ (2019: 263–268). Knott’s personal connection to the archival material creates an embodied experience that then informs her writing. Knott describes how this embodied approach resulted in her re-thinking long held assumed separations between historical disciplines. For instance, during her research when she became pregnant with her second child, it prompted her to reconsider the often-separate histories of ‘sexuality and maternity, pregnancy and infant care’ (2019: 267). Through using the personal essay form, Knott places her interaction with those subjects from the past, and her responses to them, in the foreground. She points out that her role as historian shares the qualities of her mothering: ‘Doing history, like mothering, is a form of embodied labour’ (2019: 268).

I suggest that a museology of mothering can learn from Knott’s approach to history, in which she leaves the door open from the very beginning to the very end of the book (2019: 263-268). For an exploration of maternal subjectivities, we need to leave the ‘door open’ for the messy, and incomplete things of mothering and for all that which reverberates back and forth between generations, bodies and times.

The Power of Anecdote

Lisa Baraitser’s (2008) study of maternal subjectivity, Ethics of Interruption, is structured in the form of a collection of anecdotes. This structure reflects what Baraitser considers the defining features of the maternal perspective. The mother’s unique relation to her child, Baraitser suggests, is characterised by the constant interruption to her own durational experiences by the demands and needs of the child, who won’t wait (Baraitser 2008; Stone 2012: 17). The form of anecdote which flows through Baraitser’s text, she argues, is then perfect for the articulation of mothering. This disruption, though, holds potential for it brings the mother into an exceptional perspective, a defining feature of which is a unique experience of temporality.

In Knott’s history of mothering, she too, in dialogue with Baraitser, describes anecdote as an ideal tool for illuminating maternal subjectivity and urges us to think of anecdote as ‘neither bare nor incomplete, but exactly what is needed’ (2008: 265). The messy, emotional, unfinished nature of the interrupted, the anecdote, encounter, or moment, sits uncomfortably with a united and seemingly objective voice of the museum institution. As Knott suggests, anecdote can powerfully recast ‘shards’ or ‘nuggets’ or evidence and repositions them as the main drama (2019: 264). Instead of attempting to string a narrative together or to solve a mystery, Knott’s work rests in the gaps that the archival material presents. Rather than interjecting to finish the unfinished sentences, the missing words are presented as invitations to take us deeper into the story, and into maternal subjectivity.

In Knott’s archival research, she found mothers’ letters to be vital tools; ones that point to intimate moments of mothering. It is precisely the interrupted nature of letters written by mothers—sentences cut off mid-way, letters suddenly left—that Knott finds most revealing about the interrupted nature of maternal subjectivity. In her discovery of late 18^th and 19^th century letters, for instance, Knott observes that:

Bessy Ramsden started a letter that was finished by her husband William: ‘Mrs. R. was called up to the nursery,’ he added in his own hand ‘or she would not have left off so abruptly’. (2019: 108).

Knott interweaves mothers’ anecdotes throughout history with moments from her own mothering. Reflecting on poet Alicia Ostriker who in the late twentieth century wrote of the sleep of early mothering, ‘Your sleep, is like a dirty torn cloth,’ Knott then reflects on her own current experience: ‘There’s just one long, blurry present, counted out in the days of the baby’s age. Or maybe my days since the birth’ (2019: 70). In this amalgamated history, the past (the moments of mothering Knott discovers in archival fragments) and the present (Knott’s own present-day reality as a mother), unique temporalities of mothering are highlighted suggesting that a reconsideration of temporality is required when one embarks on a history of mothering. I turn now to a discussion of the ways I have complicated linear time in my own work.

Things In-between: A Digital Exhibition

In my digital exhibition, Things In-Between (2021) I have valued anecdote and non-linear storytelling. Things In-Between was created as part of a Museum of Motherhood (MoM), Florida, residency performed virtually over a one-year period throughout numerous COVID-19 lock-downs in Australia. As part of my virtual artist residency at the MoM, I created a digital exhibition with the aim of curating pieces (or ‘nuggets,’ as Knott has described them) representative of my mothering during the pandemic. My residency was arranged with MoM with the agreed aim of researching the museum’s collections and conducting interviews with the Founder, Martha Joy Rose. The agreed outcomes were that as part of my process I would contribute content to their website. There was no specific content or exhibition pre-planned or ‘pitched’ to the museum, and because of this I felt a sense of freedom in my creative process.

A Turn to Digital Museums

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, museum theorists’ discussions of the hypothetical potential of digital technologies to create engagement at museums have been tested. Some museums (such as MoM) have met the challenge by expanding their already strong communities, using online platforms to develop wider online communities from pre-existing connections they had already formed pre-pandemic. As shown on the MoM website, online communities have sprung up directly in response to pandemic circumstances. For instance, mother artists have come together online to exhibit as part of MoM’s ‘parenting in the pandemic’ themed shows, to showcase work mother artists have made in direct response to current challenges. MoM have also strengthened their online networks by creating regular lectures, conferences and launches.

However, many museums, it seemed, went to work translating their current programs to an online format such as blog posts about museum collections and switching their in-person workshops and lectures to Zoom. For many cultural heritage museums, the themes that had populated so much of their programs (educational programs about dinosaurs to attract education excursion groups for example) were still the major focus of their online content (MV 2022).

Knowing that my exhibition content was to be presented on MoM’s website rather than in their physical museum space meant that my content choice was guided by themes and images rather than considerations for the inclusion of objects to display in a physical space. The handling or displaying of physical objects then was not a priority, and so associated issues of funding, security, and insurance did not hinder my process. As I will discuss, my series of images contain a mixture of objects, but also include portrait photographs and text. My series of images mixes objects, portrait photographs and text; the work is neither wholly an exhibit in the traditional sense, nor a museum collection, but rather a hybrid of the two. My process is reflective of a broader movement away from physical exhibitions to digital ones that was taking place globally in the time when museums were shut throughout various lockdowns.

Because I was aware that MoM had a matricentric focus, I was able to unapologetically focus my work on my experience of mothering. Not only did this mean I was given permission to display the work I produced, but knowing that this museum was specifically interested in my maternal perspective encouraged me to focus my own energies in this direction. and to witness my daily parenting experiences through a lens of curiosity: an outlook which values mothering is a source of creative potential. This had profound and long-lasting impacts on my work, as well as my agency as a mother and artist. Had I not embarked on this project I would not have had the opportunity to meditate on my identity and my labour in a way that could provide these deep considerations.

Drawing from my family life and my relationship with my daughter presented complex ethical issues, too numerous to explore thoroughly given the scope of this article. In exploring these ethical issues I drew on the ‘International Charter for Ethical Research Involving Children’ (ERIC) (2013) guidelines to inform my considerations. This research network suggests reflexivity as being a crucial element to considerations of ethics involving research with children (Graham et al. 2013, p. 176). On their website, ERIC describes the importance for the researcher to reflect on the context of research and relationships involved in their work. As they observe, every research project, ‘takes place within the context of multiple relationships, including, but not limited to, those between researchers, children and young people, parents, other family members, guardians, caregivers, significant adults/gate-keepers, institutions and funding bodies’ (Graham et al. 2013, p. 176).

To navigate the ethical issues involved in representing my own child, I have also drawn on theories developed by ‘mother-writers’—writers who have positioned their own children as important subjects of their work. Suzanne Juhasz (2003) and Patty Sotirin (2010) describe their writing as ‘mother-writing’ to articulate how their roles as writers are inextricably linked to their roles as mothers, and that their work and processes are intermingled with their caregiving. In their discussions on mother-writing, they illustrate the complexities of writing as a mother, pointing out the ‘multiplicity of positions inherent in the role of mother’ (Juhasz 2003). Juhasz (2003) situates the relationship between mother and child in such a way that the child is an extension of his or her mother, even such that their ‘identities are interwoven and inseparable, and then so are their voices.’ As Juhasz (2003) explains, mother-writing serves a purpose not just for the mother but also for the child, as it facilitates a mother’s own understanding of her mothering process, and this in turn builds ‘an important piece of maternal work that helps her to understand and care for her daughter’s needs’ (p. 409). As Juhasz’s observations show, the ethical implications of representing one’s own child in the researchers work and the inherent interrelatedness between mother and child (or what might be labelled a ‘conflict of interest’ for the researcher) are what also make this research so important to and beneficial for mothers and children for it reveals a significantly underrepresented subjectivity in public discourse: maternal subjectivity. In representing my own maternal subjectivity, I represent a subjectivity that is inextricably woven with the experiences of my child, because maternal subjectivity is not ‘subjectivity as usual’ (Baraitser 2008; Ruddick 1982; Stone 2012).

This interweaving of subjectivities I describe is only one of the many complex aspects of maternal subjectivity. When the complexity of mothering is misunderstood or minimised, this can cause erasure and injury. As pioneering maternal scholar Sara Ruddick (1982) articulates in her championing of maternal thought, the greatest sorrow, is not that a mother may fail at her many demanding mothering tasks but worse, to have those tasks ‘misdescribed, sentimentalised, and devalued’ (1982: 75-76). Perhaps more revolutionary than displaying work for the public to witness is my own process of turning my gaze onto my own mothering and seeing value in it. In order to make visible the invisible labour in caring, it must first become visible to the mother.

History without a Capital ‘H’

Knott’s creative narrative includes her anecdotes from her own life, and these are intermingled and contrasted with those of other mothers throughout times and cultures:

The telling of anecdotes, it is seeming to me, is a peculiarly powerful means of moving between history with a capital H … and the mundane stuff of living with an infant. (2019: 31).

In a similar vein to Knotts’ approach, my process coincided with the awareness that I was recording moments of significance in the broader context: in particular, the history of my country of residence, Australia and its many lockdowns during the global pandemic. But I was also recording what some would see as unremarkable: my family life, our daily routines, and insignificant objects.

I chose and photographed a selection of objects from my daily mothering life that I felt were reflective of my own and my family’s histories, and the collective history of which I am a part. In the text accompanying the exhibition, I write:

I don’t want our memories to be swallowed up by that terrifying giant; the pandemic; our experiences to be defined by a turbulent era of history. The little things that together make up our lives, have been injured, but still, those little things keep breathing. Most of the time they drag themselves, tired and bloody, but now and then, they unleash a triumphant boogie. Our ginger tomcat died. The neighbour’s house was torn down. Adult teeth erupted, school started, stopped and started again. And the things in-between. (Louise-Clarke 2021).

I resonate with Knott’s description of her process as writing history ‘without a capital H’ (2019: 265). The way my various insignificant objects are positioned together, reflects a monumental time in history (the pandemic), whilst simultaneously highlighting the non-monumental. My images work like the anecdotes Knott describes recasting ‘shards’ or ‘nuggets,’ repositioning them as the ‘main drama’ or point of interest (2019: 264).

My ‘Insignificant’ Objects

Lenka Clayton’s 2016 work 63 Objects from My Son’s Mouth, and her self-directed artist residency, An Artist Residency in Motherhood (ARiM 2016) value motherhood as a landscape of ever-shifting feelings and perceptions, and an abundant source material for art. Inspired by the style in which Clayton’s work underscores the objects she selects as significant, I approached my selection of objects with a similar reverence, by photographing them in a style similar to Clayton’s, using a technique I had grown familiar with in my own experience of photographing objects for museum catalogues.

The items Clayton puts under the spotlight (objects she has found in her child’s mouth between the ages of 8 and 15 months) would typically be dismissed by conventional museums in their acquisition process for a plethora of reasons (for instance, they are valueless as mass-produced objects, and their germy presence would pose the threat of contamination). The veneration that each object is granted in Clayton’s work is surprising, and leads one to reflect on why it is that we do not see these kinds of objects in museums. More broadly, it poses the question: why is the labour of care, from which these objects have been plucked, more generally dismissed?

In my exhibition I wanted to capture objects that I felt encapsulated my experience of mothering in the pandemic. My choice of objects was mostly spontaneous and intuitive. I am indebted to my partner, a professional photographer, who assisted me in setting up a backdrop on which we could photograph the objects as clearly as possible: a roll of white paper that we propped up on our table. Because the roll was used often, it became a constant feature of our living room. Photographing objects became an opportunistic exercise. I was able to capture objects in the moment they struck me in their poignancy. The result was the emergence of a sequence of objects that I came to view both as a collection of ‘things’ and a thematic exhibition narrative. The online platform of the MoM website served as both museum collection and exhibition in this instance. My project then resulted in an intuitive discovery of an ontology of my mothering.

Mothering Ontologies

I have granted my chosen objects a reverence not commonly reserved for such items, which offers an important reframing of mothering and an equally important reframing of ontologies. As I will show, my experiment highlights the ways that objects important to mothering might be represented in a museology of mothering.

My ontologies re-situate the chosen objects or ‘things’ (Bartlett & Henderson 2014) by the way they are captured, ordered, and displayed. I have mimicked Clayton’s photographic technique, as each item is seemingly displayed as clearly or objectively as possible, in isolation over a pristine white background. For each image I have provided a title, which sets up scenes or thematic clues for the viewer. My work provides a homage to Clayton’s work and her meditation on the ways museums and major art institutions dismiss mother artists. I also share Clayton’s aim of highlighting mothering as an art form. It also challenges the ways that popular discourse, more generally, devalues parenting. I put items under the spotlight that would typically be dismissed by conventional museums in their acquisition process. Our deceased cat, Jack’s ginger hair (Figure 1), which my daughter found days after he had died and carefully placed in a jar, is displayed along with the title ‘Goodbye.’ I found it aesthetically mesmerising how, when I played with the colour in photoshop as I edited the photograph, Jack’s hair had such a light quality to it in contrast to the orange hair we knew him to have. At first glance, it is not apparent that it is hair at all.

 

 

 

In another image, ‘Offerings’ (Figure 2) the plastic jar is placed at an altar along with other items that my daughter felt worthy to sit there, including a broken buckle from her glittery sandal. The veneration with which my daughter treated certain objects throughout this period is something that spoke to me, and I wanted to capture it. The ways that I, my daughter, and Clayton create our ontologies of objects poses the question: why is the labour of care, from which these objects have been plucked, more generally dismissed? It also highlights the ways that objects that are important to a mother’s daily life, or ‘maternal objects,’ as Lisa Baraitser (2008) calls them, are often mass produced, cheap, or generally likely be deemed insignificant in museum acquisition frameworks. In ‘Broken house’ (Figure 3) we see pieces of a demolished house. These are literal ‘shards’ of a story, broken pieces of a house that contained domestic memories. When construction workers demolished our neighbour’s house, my daughter kept calling out ‘they’re breaking the house.’ Her description and her anger at such an offence felt accurate to me, and I had trouble explaining to her why they would break a house in which people we came to know had lived their daily lives.

 

 

 

Another image ‘Mask,’ (Figure 4) shows my child’s mask, featuring a design of her favourite Disney princess, Elsa. The sight of it is both alarming and banal; a horrifying symbol of a time in which I had to protect my child from breathing in the air around her. Yet this object has become ordinary, an unremarkable daily reality.‘Feelings,’ (Figure 5) is a collection of felt stickers representing in overly simplistic form, various emotional states. These were reflective of our experience with remote learning from our home computer during pandemic school closures. As I sat by her, I would hear her schoolteachers ask the children how they were feeling, to somehow measure the impact the situation was having on them. Once, during lock-down on our permitted daily ‘exercise’ outing, I asked her what was wrong, she said ‘it’s hard to explain,’ a phrase no doubt echoing my own response to her many questions because more often than not it was too hard to comprehend let alone explain. Another image (Figure 6) shows my daughter’s artwork, a ‘family’ she made with toilet paper rolls, one of the many creative processes she initiated in our time at home, in which she used cotton wool balls and paint to make replicas of us. As well as encouraging me to immerse myself in mothering as a valuable and artistic practice, the process of creating this exhibition activated a radicalisation of time.

 

 

 

Radicalising Time 

In pandemic lock-downs I felt a sense of linear time collapsing, in an echo of the ways it had years earlier, when my child was a baby. In a remarkable time of history, our days were unremarkable, each one mirroring the day before.

In the days of mothering, I recorded in my exhibition, I felt a sense of timelessness. In lock-down our days were not punctuated by much except for brief walks in parks or a drive to buy an ice-cream. At first, being trapped in the house felt relentless and stifling. After weeks of lockdown, however, it felt that we had entered a different kind of rhythm. With no expectation of having to be anywhere on time, time seemed to disappear. In Allison Bartlett’s, ‘Babydaze: Maternal time’ she suggests that the temporality of early mothering, (specifically the act of breastfeeding) could radicalise our experience and thinking about time. She argues that this temporality can potentially be productive in ways that are not available to the focused, progressive, outcomes-based trajectory of ‘normal’ rational calendar workdays (2010: 121). In her essay, Bartlett tantalises the reader with the possibility that perhaps ‘babydaze’ can even radicalise time as we know it, and invites the reader to explore this potential (if only their mothering would leave them with the ‘time, energy and the inclination’ to do so). Here, I take up Bartlett’s call to see what maternal time or ‘babydaze’ can offer us.

At times when I was able to give in to timelessness and witness my daughter playing in her own way that seemed oblivious to any time constraints, I have to admit I felt a kernel of freedom. I recall Adrienne Rich’s (1976/2021) taste of empowered mothering in a moment she felt free to mother in her own way:

I felt wide awake, elated; we had broken together all the rules of bedtime, the night rules, rules I myself thought I had to observe in the city or become a ‘bad mother.’ We were conspirators, outlaws from the institution of motherhood; I felt enormously in charge of my life. (1976/2021: 194 – 195).

Significantly, maternal temporality and pandemic time have been framed in ways reminiscent of each other. Both are described as ‘exceptional events’ after which it is assumed we will return to normality and productivity (Chan 2020). This can be seen in the rhetoric about the pandemic’s ‘unprecedented’ era in history. The COVID-19 crisis is framed as a ‘historical rupture’ and a ‘state of exception’ after which, it is implied, we will return to business as usual. Bartlett points out that maternity is treated as an exceptional state which is at odds with the neo-liberal machine. As maternal leave systems imply, maternity is a temporary state after which the mother is expected to regain normalcy and ‘productivity.’

Just as maternal time has been highlighted for its potential for a radical rethinking of time, the potential of ‘pandemic time’ has also been explored by theorists. Nadine Chan (2020) examines ‘pandemic temporality’ as presenting possible alternatives to capitalist temporalities through ‘synchronous and collective activism.’ Chan suggests that the pandemic’s disruption to the nine-to-five workday and the five-day work week (temporal institutions rooted in a long history of industrial capitalism) enables new temporal possibilities to emerge—that of ‘collective, explosive, revolutionary time’ (Chan 2020).

Theorists have speculated that a certain type of temporality has been conjured by the pandemic, in which virtual worlds have rapidly expanded creating what some see as ‘asynchronicities’ of digital lifeworlds. Chan (2020) considers the pandemic’s temporal dimensions ‘distal temporalities.’ Chan uses this term to describe the divergence between lived temporal zones during the pandemic. Chan suggests that our experiences of temporality have moved away from commonly shared and equal temporalities, towards temporalities that are experienced remarkably differently. The race towards digital productivity during the pandemic has been buoyed by new and existing structures of labour inequality. Virtual workplaces, for instance, are accessible unevenly to those white collar workers whose privilege affords them the means to participate in these emergent spheres of digital life while low-wage ‘essential workers’ risk their health for wages in ways for which the labour market does not adequately compensate.

In some sense, pandemic lockdowns could be understood as freezing movement and activity. As people stayed at home and heavily polluting industries were put on pause, global carbon emissions dipped (Le Quéré et al. 2020). But in the digital spheres, rapid activity flourished. This has highlighted the disparity between those who profited the most from lockdown who were already, or could easily, ‘plug into’ online marketplaces (Chan 2020; Lowrey 2020). But theorists cite cases in which marginalised activists, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, have given us a glimpse of what alternatives to capitalist time might look like, and argue that these synchronous activist actions can arise out of asynchronous worlds; the virtual can benefit the actual. While it must be acknowledged here that the internet has provided platforms for the flourishing of injurious right-wing movements, my focus is on the potentiality of the digital spheres that Chan has examined, to discover what could be possible for a museology of mothering. Drawing on Chan’s observations, I reflect on the ways the temporalities of a pandemic have opened up potentials for collective action (Chan 2020).

This exploration of pandemic time and ‘babydaze’ is helpful for my argument. I suggest that disrupting historical linear ‘progress’ brings us closer to understanding maternal temporality. Because resisting progress helps us radicalise time and the capitalistic drive towards progression, it affords more agency to mothers and encourages more recognition of their labour.

‘Detoxing from Progress’

‘Progress is a death sentence.’ (Rees 2022).

Feminists have been critical of the ways in which Western cultures have inherited and interiorised an understanding of time as linear, incremental, and developmental, which values climactic events, dates and the ‘heroes’ of history while erasing the quotidian and those who do the work of the everyday: the working class, migrants, women and children (2022: 121). With the urgency of the climate crisis and global concerns increased by the pandemic, the way historical narratives are told is increasingly being critiqued. Yves Rees (2022) has urged historians to ‘detox from progress.’ Rees invites us to ‘radically reinvent the temporal scripts we live by’ (2022: 65). The danger of the narrative of progress, Rees argues, is ultimately environmental destruction: ‘the climate crisis is in part the fault of historical consciousness’ (2022: 64). According to Rees, the need to find alternative temporalities for historical narrative is a pressing one.

Rees argues that during the Anthropocene, the notion of ‘progress,’ so central to the arc of historical narrative, needs to be overturned. They argue that ‘progress ideology’ has been the temporal logic that underpins Western political and economic life (Rees 2022: 60) and has been a driving force behind anthropogenic climate change that is driven by values of economic growth and imperial expansion. Rees argues that if we think of the historian’s role as being akin to a time traveller, who travels along a particular ‘temporal index,’ then we must find alternative temporalities (Rees 2022: p. 64). I argue that my exhibition engages with Rees’ suggested alternative temporalities by activating characteristics of ‘maternal time’ and aspects of ‘pandemic time.’

Central to historicism is the notion of development. Maternal labour on the other hand—in its repetition and low status—is conducted outside of this paradigm. An uneasy dynamic has always existed between maternal time and the time favoured by tales of progression and triumph. When engaging with representations of maternal experience, making a distinction between lived time and historical time is important. As scholars from various disciplines have observed, lived time as a temporality is not a neutral, objective framework, but rather our way of existing temporally (Stone 2013: 1). Historical narratives, on the other hand, tend toward linear narratives, with a focus on progression and an emphasis on national concerns. The force of the neoliberal progress narrative has also been critically taken up within queer theory: Shannon Winnubst argues that it is precisely a temporality of futurity that promotes contemporary politics of normalisation. To contrast this, there is a long history within queer theory of re-imagining temporality outside of a heteronormative future of ‘childhood→adulthood→marriage→children→death’ (Winnubst 2010: 138).

Reflecting on maternal scholars’ (Baraitser 2008; Stone 2013) descriptions of a maternal temporality, the illusion of continuity (Knott 2019: 265) of a linear narrative would hardly be sufficient to express a temporality and subjectivity that instead becomes vivid in the disjointed, and the fragmented; a temporality that encompasses past, present, and imagined futures. I argue here that engaging with maternal temporality holds powerful effects, even beyond the representation of mothering because it challenges the very foundation of historical narrative. In doing so, its effects ripple out to dismantle many assumed notions underpinning capitalist frameworks.

Linear narratives must be subverted if we are to strive towards representation of mothering’s temporalities. Mothers need to be granted the freedom to knock down narrative structure if they find it ill-fitting to express their internal worlds. Our museum practice must seek to foreground the personal voice. We must challenge the concept of a ‘unitary understanding of time upon which history is predicated’ (Pascoe Leahy 2020: 273), and we must rethink the role of time in museum narratives.

Valuing Matricentric Narrative

The MoM residency has helped me illustrate the specificity of my mothering experiences, by complicating linear time and by valuing matricentric narratives. Authentic expressions of maternal perspectives are able to be achieved by engaging in radical specificity. In ‘Difference and Repetition,’ Gilles Deleuze (1994) seeks to extract difference from the concept of identity in order to grasp the specificity of any particular time, place, or thing. Deleuze argues that when we think of something as different, we are often basing that understanding on an Aristotelian conception of difference as multiple manifestations of an essential identity.

Drawing on Deleuze’s 1994 work on difference, Patty Sotirin suggests that mother-writing makes an implicit claim: that our different experiences of ‘momhood’ are all aspects of the dominant concept of motherhood, and that we are all subject to the determinations of that concept. The power of autoethnography written by mothers on the other hand, is that it enables the authors to express experiences ‘beyond representation’ (Sotirin 2016). A major attribute of autoethnography that enables expressions of non-normative aspects of mothering is its ability to reach affective intensities of bodily sensations. These sensations, as Sotirin observes, are not generalisable because they are so intimate in their specificity, showing that each experience of mothering is different (Sotirin 2016). Here, I draw on the work of Sotirin who argues that autoethnographic mother-writing possesses unique attributes to enable authentic depictions of mothering.

In her analysis of autoethnographic writing about aspects of mothering that fall outside normative motherhood, including the event of a miscarriage, Sotirin argues that mother-writing enables non-conventional narrative structures. She analyses a mother-writer’s description of a miscarriage in which her sensations are expressed in a poetic description of a dream. Sotirin argues that these unusual structures enable them to articulate the ‘incommunicability’ of mothering, in particular the indistinct and shifting boundaries between the mother’s ‘inside/outside, private/public encounter with life and death’. The mother-writing form offers new tools that free mothers from having to fit their experiences into ‘easily digestible well-worn narratives’ (Sotirin 2016). I argue that the affective intensities that Sotirin attributes to autoethnography can also be accessible through non-linear histories that focus on mothering as told by mothers themselves.

I suggest that Sotirin’s argument is valuable because commercial memoirs about motherhood can propagate the idea of it as a patriarchal, dominant institution. Even if the author is chafing under the pressure of motherhood, its normative paradigms are held up as a regulating mirror against which all mothers are reflected. Sotirin argues that autoethnography, on the other hand, has the capacity to bring us into deeper engagements with specific individual perspectives on mothering and a ‘radical sense of difference’ (Sotirin 2016).

In a consideration of Sotirin’s engagement with Deleuze’s work on radical specificity, I argue that a museology of mothering would benefit from moving away from the impulse to identify the ‘essence’ of a particular experience (for instance, mothering) toward engaging with the radical specificity of the personal. If we apply Sotirin’s argument and her interpretation of Deleuze’s radical specificity to curatorial design, then difference emphasises ‘the particularity that is’ and helps us to rethink mothering. Engaging with these maternal objects have the potential to engage with radical specificity thereby dwelling in the place of mothering (as Rich & O’Reilly have defined it) beyond the limitations of the institution of motherhood.

My exhibition has enabled me to draw out my own unique experiences. During the pandemic, during which I performed this residency, MoM had successfully adjusted to online formats and strengthened and created online communities, a testament to their tireless commitment to maternal voices despite being underfunded and not government-run. As my analysis shows, the matricentric and matrifocal values of MoM enabled me, and encouraged me to engage unapologetically with maternal objects (or ‘(in)significant’ objects) and my maternal temporality as experienced in the pandemic. My work, which speaks from my own specific experiences of mothering rather than seeking to represent commonalities or generalisable definitions of motherhood, is thereby able to engage with radical specificity. Without the pressure imposed on me to represent mothers or motherhood, and free from the constraints of pressures to have my work be representative of or even in dialogue with grand or national narratives, and without having my process or my mothering being policed I was able to focus on what is specific to my own mothering experience. What became possible in this process was a deviation from motherhood as an institution, and a movement towards a more honest, specific and perhaps ultimately empowered form of mothering.

I am mothering in an era of late-stage capitalism and climate catastrophe. The global pandemic has amplified the impossible pressures enforced by neo-liberal values (to own and to do more), and one of its most frightening features, a disregard for those who can’t keep up, is being revealed. Returning to what is popularly known as ‘post pandemic’ life has been fraught with anxiety. Pressure to go back to ‘normal’ life threatens to topple any ‘progress’ made in ‘detoxing from progress’—re-thinking systems that are unworkable and dehumanising for carers as well as for those who live outside normative paradigms. But I remain hopeful that in questioning the arrow of history, as I have done in my work, we can access new possibilities and new ways of being. As Rees reminds us, progress was after all, made by humans:

Once we name progress as nothing more than a particular theory of history, it begins to lose its grip on our imaginations. It becomes possible to see that progress narrative were made by humans and so can be unmade by them (2022: 65).