by “Good art has no grimmer enemy,” Cyril Connolly famously wrote, “than the pram in the hall.” Have children, run supercilious maximization, and your creativity is well and truly screwed. It seems that for thousands of years parents have not made the great art of troubling him, or insulting those who give birth, or their children. Not even, as this amazing Hayward Gallery touring exhibition shows, procreation itself may be the key inspiration.
Acts of Creation is a delight from first to last, an exceptional (and touring) sale of contemporary artworks to frighten, move and amaze, all one hundred and more delving deep into motherhood. It opens with a stirring mystery object. Resting on a plinth is a form that suggests a woman’s pelvic anatomy, delicate but strong, fashioned from animal horns, twigs, steel and red clay soil. Fine silver wires run between the cavities.
Wangechi Mutu’s sculpture quickly explores gynecology, with its intimations of bone, fallopian tubes and speculum. But his title really is Healed. It is a prayer for fertility and a violent and beautiful embodiment of itself.
This great debut is also paired with another one, which can be heard even before you enter the open gallery. The newborn’s soft gurgles combine with an echoing call and response from its mother. But these sounds suddenly turn poignant when you come to the installation from which they release. Fani Parali constructs a neonatal intensive care unit incubator as a skeletal structure of cold hard metal; where the child should be a ghostly pencil representation.
A baby comes slowly, the hard labor enacted in sketch after intense sketch, Ghislaine Howard’s aesthetic midwifery. It transforms the body, in Annegret Soltau’s photographic self-portraits, literally stitched and mended. Even before birth, the miracle is strange. Susan Hiller documents her own pregnancy in 1977, inside and out, in short words and stark photographs of her stomach swelling like an almost primordial topography.
This is one of the many classic works in this show (one in the eye for Connolly). Here are Paula Rego’s brutally honest etchings of Portuguese women who suffered back-street abortions alone, and some of Mary Kelly Post Partum Documentcontaining her son’s first words and attempts at writing etched on a slate.
Celia Paul’s painting of her son, Frank, raised by her grandmother, shows Frank filling the foreground and herself the best view in a mirror. Views from Carrie Mae Weems Kitchen Table Setwhich runs word against image also, to show mother and daughter at the kitchen table with all kinds of close and sudden standoff.
Writer and critic Hettie Judah is an excellent curator, with exceptional knowledge and insight, and this show brings out as many new names as established stars. I loved Lea Cetera’s brilliantly epigrammatic hourglass, its spiral form extending into a glass oval containing grains of sand that can never be released. A play on lost hours, stopped time and biological clocks. You Can’t Be It All he is entitled.
Leni Dotham Sleeping Madonna she shows a photograph of the artist in red robes with a child at her breast – a self-portrait like an old Renaissance painting. Except that the image moves almost imperceptibly: the infant apparently falling out then starting again and the artist almost falling asleep. A satiation: a exhaustion.
Judah uses wall color to empathetic effect: warm reds for the early years, sonic blue for a deep reflection on motherhood and how it changes a whole life, gentle whiteness for a gallery of loss.
This could mean the loss of a pregnancy, a baby, or the baby that never came in the first place. Elina Brotherus’s photographic self-portraits show the transition back through IVF in all its lonely agony, including the very expensive drugs, the artist injecting herself next to the ubiquitous yellow needle bin, the wait two weeks of mounting and the disastrous fall of the negative test.
How to be an artist and a mother? Marlene Dumas presents her world-renowned individual heads, in their ambiguous watercolor dyes, to her little daughter for inspiring poster paints. Jai Chuhan throws herself off the canvas as she falls on her knees with her infant, in a mess of paint pots.
Billie Zangewa Embroidered Fabric Collage – a rather generous title All Mrs, in view of the glamorous mother figure in jeans and high heels in the middle of the image – it is surrounded by junk yards of scattered toys. In his hand is an unnamed scrap of silk – literally Zangewa medium – chewed by an infant.
What to make of this new world you live in? The vague plastic glow of bottles and pumps fills the canvas in Caroline Walker’s anxious non-life. Chantal Joffe’s double portrait of herself, naked, sitting next to her clothed daughter, shows the unfathomable and endless bonds of motherhood. Hannah Starkey’s photograph shows a mother trudging through the snow, shopping bags slung over her shoulder.
Game Bobby Baker Timed Drawings they are extremely tragicomic extremely attractive from early motherhood. A drawing of crisps on the carpet made in five quick minutes; the baby’s soft nape after the first haircut; her own head suddenly exploding. Most affecting is a quick sketch in which she attempts self-acceptance: Comfort Yourselfall within a mere 20 minutes.
Mystery, depth, love, sadness and wonder: a work in this show achieves nothing less. And the full retreat to the pram in the hall is the revelation of humanity in Rineke Dijkstra’s quiet photographs of young mothers holding their babies within moments of birth. Exhausted, visibly postpartum, some still bleeding, all courageous, proud and protective of the new life they brought into this world.
• Creation Acts: On Art and Motherhood is at the Arnolfini, Bristol, until 26 May, then tours to Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham (22 June-29 September), Millennium Gallery, Sheffield (24 October-21 January 2025) and Dundee Contemporary Arts (Spring 2025).
