Parenting is a messy business. And it is that chaos that is the theme of Sorry About the Mess, a show of more than 20 artists and writers who are mothers, taking place in Meta’s former offices at 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, London.
“The idea of mess and motherhood within an inhospitable office environment just felt so right,” says Millie Walton, who organised the exhibition. She is a London-based writer and the founder of Babe Station, a project she started shortly after her son was born last year, to “explore the relationship between motherhood and making art”.
Faced with the challenge of continuing creative work after having a child, Walton organised creative writing workshops for new mothers at Phlox Books in east London, and it was through conversations with some artists who attended that the idea for the exhibition was born.
The show is co-curated by Niamh Gordon, a writer who has overseen the written works, and Nefeli Sidiropoulou, a costume and set designer who has helped with staging.
Story of loss
Artists and writers taking part include Holly Stevenson, Sophie Goodchild, Chantal Powell, Justine Hounam and Tamarin Norwood, whose audio installation is a reading from her devastating book, The Song of the Whole Wide World, in which she tells her story of having a baby, Gabriel, who she knew would die after he was born.
Motherhood-themed shows have become almost a trend since the pandemic, but some artists have shied away from participating, Walton says, as they feel the “mummy” label is reductive, even problematic.
The writer Hettie Judah has curated a touring show about the topic called Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, which opens in Dundee next month. She is also the author of How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (and Other Parents) (2021). “Part of the reason I did the show and wrote the book was that there are generations of women who were fed this idea that you couldn’t be an artist and a mother,” Judah says, and “that if you wanted people to collect or show your art, motherhood wasn’t an appropriate subject.”
Attitudes are changing. The 2024 Turner Prize contingent included three mothers—Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur and Delaine Le Bas—and Judah points to prominent artists such as Camille Henrot, Caroline Walker and Tala Madani who make work that unapologetically references their experience of having children.
But while being an artist and a mother is now less of a taboo, the practical impediments remain—the lack of time and cost of childcare in particular. “Often people lose their studio because it’s an expense they can’t justify, and that then has an impact on the kind of work they’re making—perhaps they’re working from the kitchen table on a smaller scale,” Judah says. “So you see this lacuna mid-career. Then they go back to work when they’re older only to hit the problem of ageism.”
• Sorry About the Mess, 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, 7-30 March
• Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, Dundee Contemporary Arts, 19 April-13 July