2019 National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) Conference
What’s YOUR story? The Mother of All Confessions is an open confessional booth for discussions surrounding maternity and parenting. Come share your parenting story and contribute to an ongoing and developing conversation about maternity and art.
NCECA Program Abstract
What’s YOUR story? The Mother of All Confessions is an open confessional booth for discussions that investigate issues surrounding art, maternity, and parenting. All are invited to share stories and contribute to an ongoing and developing conversation about maternity, parenting, and art.
Launched in 2014 after surveying, interviewing and documenting a cross section of artists who are also mothers, the website Both Artist and Mother examines how children, or the circumstances of their lives as they include them, changed and impacted the work these artists make and/or how they make it. Material gathered for the web based project Both Artist and Mother, particularly during interviews with artist/mothers, piqued the interests of project collaborators Kate Fisher and Erin Furimsky to delve deeper. The site includes interviews, written and audio, with artist/mothers of all ages, accompanied by photos. Averaging 10,000 visitors annually, Fisher is overwhelmed by the outpouring of interest and the number of artists reaching out. Since founding the site, Fisher increasingly looks for ways to subversively and overtly discuss what it is to be an artist/mother. How can we shift narratives on maternity to validate it as critical source material for creating, without representing ourselves as “sentimental” mothers? Why is motherhood still a taboo in art? Why shouldn’t we celebrate women with children and this meaningful life stage, instead of confronting mothers with questions that place value on what they were before? (Ex: When will you go back to work? Get back in those jeans? Go back to art making?)
This interactive work takes the form of a modular “confessional” booth. Participants will engage in dialogues about the stereotypes, popular beliefs/misconceptions, struggles, and the future of mothers and artist/mothers. Engaging conference participants in conversations about art and maternity is a meaningful way to expand artist/mother visibility. While this project originated from the maternal viewpoint, the project space will enable exploration on perspectives from: the paternal, the artists’ child, LGBTQ individuals, racial/cultural diversity in families, children caring for aging parents, future parents, etc. The confessional structure encourages two beings to occupy a shared space; much like the way maternity requires that women share their spaces, both internally and externally.
The sound booth will generate an audio recording of the participants as they act as confessor or confessee. The type of mom in the booth (Ex: Mom of young kids, grandma, mom who her child) will rotate and encourage connectivity and diversity in the conversations.
Additionally, children are welcome to participate in the conversation too. On the exterior of the booth there will be a station for kids to visually explore the questions, “What does a mom do? What does and artist do?” We hope that engaging both generations in an exploration of this subject can promote a greater understanding of maternity and art.
