Paper short abstract:

Drawing on contemporary art discourse as ways of conceptualising dynamic nature of the mother-child agency and embracing feminist debates on caring, the paper explores ways of representing maternal resilience and maternal peripherality.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores a notion of peripherality in the context of maternal care. Maternal periphery in this paper reflects a sense of disempowerment in a personal and professional life, a consequence of caring and a unique tendency for a mother to separate caring experiences and her thinking. Boulous Walker (1998) argued the separation of thinking and feeling for a mother-artist results in a shift to the margins to avoid ‘contamination’ of political and theoretical art discourse. This separation can be extended to any mother in a process that manifests itself in a constant negotiation of ‘porous multiple selves’ (Kosmala 2017, p. 94), concerning professional and occupational roles. Maternal resilience in the context of multi-layered dislocation stimulates the formation of othered ‘new’ episteme for creative praxis and research born out of peripherality. It also posits a challenge, resulting in deepening a temporary dislocation and disempowerment. Drawing on the examples of contemporary art discourse as ways of conceptualising dynamic nature of the mother-child agency and embracing contemporary feminist debates on caring, the discussion focuses specifically on ways of representing maternal resilience and maternal peripherality. The selected artworks are drawn from European artists who attempt to adhere to the complexities of ‘the maternal in and as art’ (Loveless, 2016). Yet narratives of mothering are not unfolding solely from mother’s perspective and also transcend purely affective dimension of maternal labour.