The Artist

In early January 2020, weeks before the world entered the Upside Down and months before our personal lives changed forever, the husband and I attended a 1920s theme party. Thrown by a close friend of mine, it was a gathering of crazy, beautiful people on a spacious terrace with views of Africa and the giant rock standing guard over the strait of Gibraltar, linking the Atlantic Ocean with the Mediterranean Sea. The walls were decorated with prohibition posters and hand-picked reed, the tables boasted a colourful mix of potluck contributions, and uplifting swing music spilled from the speakers and into the sunset. We complemented one another on our carefully curated customs ranging from euro-shop boas to carved heritage pipes and improvised flapper caps and dresses, sipped on chilled sangrias and herbal infusions and passed joints around, blissfully unaware of all that lay ahead.

We mingled, small-talked, escaped to quiet corners, rejoined the crowd, and finally found ourselves in the kitchen – where else? – and big-talked. At first, with the aforementioned host and his former partner. Later, with an acquaintance-turned-friend we hadn’t seen in a while. An artist whose main medium had been wood and screen-printing and who had, in the time since we’d last found ourselves building a sub-group in someone else’s kitchen-quarters, embraced a new art form with his girlfriend: parenthood. Tired and warm, like a flame cradled by the interior walls of a candle, love glowed between them and on to their nine-month-old. Watching their synchronized movements – their son’s pudgy hand safely unravelling from his mom’s index finger, as his unsteady but strong-willed tip-toes headed into his father’s embrace – I found myself unable to suppress a question that was as present on my mind as my inability to put the “baby question” to rest.

Just a few months prior to the part of the conversation I am about to share, I was told, like several times before, that it was going to be difficult for me to conceive and have a baby. Which is why I never really let myself fully entertain the idea, let alone plan for, having one; because despite all the fears that came with it, it’s what I’d always dreamt of, and I knew the grief would be too great, were it not to work out. So, the husband and I had basically reached an unspoken agreement: we would let fate decide. Fortunately, it was on our side. In the meantime, however, I’d find myself contemplating and getting increasingly curious about varying aspects of motherhood. Specifically, the selfishness art requires, and the selflessness becoming a mother appeared to demand. The opportunity to interview the perfect subjects – two fully established creatives and parents – presented itself there, in the grey-tiled kitchen, with my friend’s freshly baked cheese-sticks making my stomach growl loud enough to momentarily drown out the confused yodelling of my uterus.

I fumbled for and threatened to stumble over the right words, then decided there was enough confianza in the room to just come right out with it, and ask: how has parenthood impacted your creativity? I’m not sure either of them had been asked that question before, but I am certain that raising it made them consider it from a different perspective for the first time. I wonder how they would answer now, three years on and with a second child in the mix; and whether they would answer differently if asked separately. On that day, and in that particular instance though, their answer was one that has stuck with me. They admitted to having to juggle and shift their focus, but they agreed that they were working on their most important project to date: crear their son. I loved that answer back then, but it’s only now that I find myself in the same situation that I am beginning to wholly understand it. That I may not be writing, painting, experimenting as much as I’d like to, but I am always creating – the daughter, myself, our family, my work.

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At the beginning of this year, I signed myself up for a live drawing session and seminar from the London Drawing Group, titled Louise Bourgeois: Doodling and the Unconscious. Having finally seen – and become entirely captivated – by her sculpture Maman outside of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao some months before, I knew this was going to be the perfect gift to myself. Coming from a family of artistic welders – particularly my dad, who’s always dreamt of creating his own giant spider to serve as a carport – I felt I understood the unthinkable amount of work and planning that had gone into creating this sculpture. Taking it in as the person I am today, I felt I understood the unthinkable mental and physical labour that had gone into creating a piece as cosmical as motherhood itself.

The workshop taught me the importance of celebrating an artform as outwardly unimportant as doodling and, therewith, befriending the unconscious. Doodling and scribbling as a way to reconnect with that inner voice that often gets muted by daily noises. One that can talk you through the colours that are currently being mixed on the painter’s palette that is your mind, and helps you to appreciate the mediums with which they will be brushed, glued, hammered or sculpted onto and/or into your heart. Led by Luisa MacCormack, it included an exercise that saw participants, eyes closed and with markers in each hand, drawing on a big sheet of paper, following a very introspective approach: using the breath and energy flow through the body to study its interiors by setting free-form, intuitive marks, using each invisible cell and vein as guidance.

It took a while to shut off the brain and focus only on the body, for the hands to loosen and move smoothly with all the sensations that were coming up, no matter how minute or massive they were. Once I got the hang of it, I exercised my will to feel it all; my feet aching from the cold seeping through the marbled floors; the stinging pain in my lower back and the upper half of my ribcage, rigid and cramped like two arthritic hands cupped and ready to receive tenderness; the tingle of milk making my ducts blossom, the vitality of my breasts nurturing bond and body. The heaviness versus the lightness of limbs, the ambiguity within the depths of my chest area, the thirst in my hands and the stifled gut-feeling; the unwavering unconditionality of my love and the resulting tiredness. I explored these repetitive lines like a mantra, filling them in like the patterns of a simplistic mandala, in the colours that were merely available to me – purple, blue and pink highlighters – but were, in fact, telling of the moment. Of my palette. Blindly and 100% feelingly.

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I often joke that, in the creation of the daughter, the husband’s contribution was merely of Pollockian nature – I was the true artist who moulded the abstraction of cells into an absolute masterpiece. I exaggerate, of course. Without the planting of his seed, my body never would have blossomed and opened like an O’Keefe flower. Without his tending to the soil wherein she is growing her roots, she would be wielding only half the characteristics she is now, with the strength of a robust branch, smiling in the face of the world’s winds. Be this as it may, as I stood face to enormous spider leg for the second time, my eyes tracing the welded seams, and looking up at the sac of carefully guarded marble eggs, I maintain that, the physicality and emotionality of motherhood, is its very own artform. One that requires the endurance and presence of an Abramovic gaze and Wim Hofian breath on a 24/7 basis.

A scene from the live-action adaptation of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web comes to mind; the one that had me ugly crying into the daughter’s curls. Right at the end, when most of her spider babies ballooned into the skies, carried by the breeze, their endless curiosity and the primal confidence Charlotte – and, ultimately, Wilbur – had built in them. It’s the perpetual part of the creative process, what Aldous Harding refers to as “the braiding”. We pour, mould, carve, etch, layer and transfer, step back, muster, recognize, readjust, hold back the tears, throw in the towel, pick it back up to swaddle and wipe away the puddles of waterworks released, and do it all over again. And with each new phase, age, fascination and conflict, we watch them go – our magnum opus – setting off on whichever path they need to be on, and we start again, weaving, spinning, continuously braiding the cocoon we ourselves have become, where the pieces we birthed return to for regular retouching, even as they age.

This kind of work requires a studio solid but rarely spacious enough to (de)construct in, and that is possibly one of the biggest challenges in the performance piece that is motherhood. And yet, we find it within ourselves every day, even on those rare occasions when we keep the doors to our galleries shut for just a couple of hours, eventually, perhaps, for periods on end. At times the key to the doors of our artistic perception may take a little jiggling, on others they may fling open with ease and anticipation. On days like today, it’ll take a kick, a push and a shove, but once we’ve entered, it’ll all make sense again. We lay away the welding gun, spin around and refocus on the self-portrait. This is exactly when we must make a point of remembering to doodle first and foremost. To discard any false hope of perfection and rejoice in the knowledge that, all those lines, scribbles and markers form part of the webs we keep on spinning – blindly and 100% feelingly. It’s in the doodles, the scribbles, the mirror of our subconscious, where we find ourselves. The artists. Where we find ourselves as and of, Maman.