MOTHRA: Artist-Parent Project Labour and Love

This article is published in issue 41.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue

We are on the beach at the shores of Lake Ontario on a warm, late summer’s day. Under the shade of a tree, blankets are arranged side by side on the sand where a group of artists has gathered. Children run back and forth through the surf, collecting pebbles in the dappled light. Nearby, three children are drawing on large smooth rocks with found charcoal and then pressing their drawings onto their skin to make temporary tattoos. The discussion amongst the adults today focuses on funding for artists with caring responsibilities. When we go back inside, shrieks of laughter and thumps of tiny feet make their way through the halls, as we disperse into the studios, kitchen, and communal areas.

My task here is to share with you the successes and challenges of MOTHRA: Artist-Parent Project, an artist residency I founded in 2018. Along the way, I want to question dominant ideas that lead artists, and the structures meant to support them, to believe in and adhere to unsustainable working models. I’ll meander through a few different themes, as I take you, dear reader, on a tour of the MOTHRA residency on Toronto Island.

From the beach we will cross the lawn, enter the building through the south doors and settle into The Fireplace Room. A sofa and an assortment of chairs are positioned around the fireplace at the far end of the room. This large communal room, with a view out over the lawn, is where we gather for introductions on the first day and for daily meetings.

Discussing the relationship between parenting, art-making, and labour is not unlike Virginia Woolf’s task of being asked to speak about “Women and Fiction,” in that it could mean a number of things. For example, are we talking about outsourced childcare or the inclusion of children? Both mean different things to parenting artists, and just as Woolf found that her topic raised all sorts of prejudices and passions, so do we.

We have the artist, parent, child, and of course the art itself as our central characters. We also have a particular art world, and society at large. Just as Woolf did, we must look at the social, political, and economic conditions in which artists are expected to work, research, and produce art. Her task became the famous essay A Room of One’s Own (1929). She admitted that she was not going to be able to offer “a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantel-piece for ever.” Instead, she offered one “minor point”: that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”¹ 

The challenges that come between women and their creative pursuits have largely stayed the same since 1929.² It is the solution that needs re-evaluating. Like Woolf, there is no way I can address all aspects of this topic here, but ninety-five years later I hope to offer up a different assertion: that an artist who is a parent with caregiving responsibilities must have (state) money and a community to make art. Enter MOTHRA.

MOTHRA: Artist-Parent Project is a network of artists. We’ve published zines, exhibited together, and gathered at conferences. But what the project is really known for is child-inclusive artist residencies. In order to attend, artists must come with the child or children they care for, with the aim of experimenting with how their care work can exist either alongside or entwined with their artwork.

We meet at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts, on Toronto Island, on the Treaty Land and Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Gibraltar Point offers self-directed and thematic residencies, as well as long-term studio spaces. The site is a former school, saved from demolition in the late 1990s. Artists-in-residence are provided with a bedroom as well as studio space.

The MOTHRA residency program is in its sixth year at this location. There are three to four weeklong residencies a year, each one taking between ten to fifteen artists, plus children, and sometimes partners or other family members.

In the Fireplace Room, we’ve collectively worked on a few things: written a manifesto, and an open-source grant template for pregnant artists and artist-parents. We’ve discussed the work of feminist writers bell hooks and Silvia Federici, and the work of artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. We also eat, dance, watch films, hold workshops, and build forts in this room.

It is no secret that artist-parents feel that their caring responsibilities put them at a disadvantage, in comparison to artists without children and those who work in other sectors. These challenges are well documented in research done in the UK, Ireland, and Australia.³ In 2023, I conducted a nation-wide survey asking artist-parents how they feel about the relationship between their professions, their practice, and their care work and parenting responsibilities. The report from this research will be published in 2024.

It is also well known in art history, feminist studies, and current contemporary art discourse that artist-parents (often women) feel that their careers suffer because of their caring responsibilities. We recognize that our culture typically demands that we separate our family lives from our professional lives in order to be taken seriously. A room of one’s own—or, in our case, a studio of one’s own—is seen as the ideal working environment; a sign of success; a signifier of dedication to one’s calling as an artist. MOTHRA is interested in what happens when we push back against this, when we admit important social relationships into our professional lives, and—specifically for artists—ask what happens when we bring our children into a studio setting with the intention of making work, either with or alongside our children?

Many artists enter into a busy period in their careers at the same time they are likely to have children. For many, art-making can come into conflict with care work. We are told, and conditioned to believe, that art and motherhood are not compatible, and parenthood as subject matter is discouraged.⁴ MOTHRA presents artist-parents with the opportunity to see what can be generated when we bring these things together, giving them the time and space to try things out for a week or two in a studio setting, alongside other artists who are in the same situation.

I have to be clear: MOTHRA isn’t suggesting all artist-parents eschew outsourced childcare, get a studio, and stick themselves in that studio with their child and wait for the magic to happen (although I’d recommend that they try, and that they apply for an arts council grant in order to do it!). For MOTHRA, to suggest that artists work in a different way is not a straightforward proposition. It always has to be an offer, or an invitation to experiment, because the dominant way of working—of being alone with no interruptions or care responsibilities—holds such a grip.

It’s time to stretch our legs again…

We’ll now leave the Fireplace Room and continue on our tour. I mentioned that this building used to be a school. What do you want to do when you see a long empty school hallway before you?! Run! Let’s run partway down the hallway to the kitchen. Look out for the gender-neutral washrooms on either side of the hallway on the way. They also have a baby change station and step stools to help children up to the sink.

For MOTHRA, art is made among social relations, and is a social and collective practice. The hallway is an important aspect of our residencies. While these hallways are usually empty, with artists working away behind closed doors, during MOTHRA they enable the flow of children and artists in and out of the studios. In fact, what happens here is as important as what happens in the studios themselves.

Residencies are important for artists. They can be a point of prestige and help advance an artist’s career. But they are so much more: places to meet other artists; to be sociable; to find out about each other’s lives and work; to feel that you are part of a larger project. Yet many residency providers downplay these aspects—keeping them secret perhaps, in case they look too sociable, and at odds with what it takes to make serious artwork. So, their limited idea of what a residency is doesn’t reflect what actually goes on or what artists want.

If you want confirmation that 20th-century modes of patriarchal artistic professionalism are still in action right now, all you have to do is ask artist residency providers if you can apply and attend with your child(ren). While some will say “yes,” others offer hilarious and infuriating responses. An artist residency provider on Canada’s east coast described how including children “…defeats the whole purpose of taking an artist out of their daily routine and providing them with an opportunity to concentrate on their practice in a community of their peers.” Another in Ontario stated the importance of the artist being taken away from the distractions of everyday life. The children of artists are not allowed at either residency. At the suggestion that this is a discriminatory practice and one that bars participation from a large section of Canada’s practicing artists, they went quiet. To think that an artist might make work shaped or inspired by the “distractions of everyday life” was beyond their imagination, perhaps.

Because not all residencies allow artists to bring their children, MOTHRA’s welcoming of kids alone makes it popular. It has also changed policy, so that now Gibraltar Point welcomes children at any time—not just on a MOTHRA residency. But what MOTHRA does provide—outside of simply allowing children through the doors, covering up electrical sockets, and having highchairs in the kitchen—is a community and a collective work setting.

For MOTHRA, the communal spaces, kitchen, studios, and hallways are all sites important to the residency. These are discursive spaces that provide socialization. Every space in that building and the surrounding landscape becomes a venue for collective activity.

Here we are in the artists’ kitchen. A large communal table sits in the middle of the space. At one end of this room is a sofa and coffee table, and at the other end is the kitchen.

A collection of reading material is kept here in the kitchen over by a wall of windows, with books such as: Angela Garbes’ Essential Labour (2022), Lucy Jones’ Matrescence (2023), Katy Deepwell’s 50 Feminist Art Manifestos (2022), Hettie Judah’s How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and Other Parents) (2022), and bell hooks’ Feminist Theory (1984), to name a few.

On a MOTHRA residency, cooking and cleaning up after ourselves are also our responsibilities. There is no dining room overlooking the mountains with a bountiful buffet, no catering. When we use dishes, we also wash those dishes. There have been artists on this residency who resented having to do this labour. They felt that doing these tasks was too much like being at home. I took this feedback very seriously and, for the next residency, I decided to hire a caterer to make us all lunch one day. I did this to highlight the fact that this work, thought of by some as an inconvenience, is work nonetheless—in all senses of the word. I invited a trained chef to come to the site for two days; one day to prepare, the second day to cook and serve lunch. Our chef, Anne, was introduced to the group and joined us for lunch. It soon became clear that not participating in communal cooking and cleaning means that someone else has to do it. But, at what cost? What are they missing out on? Why is it expected that the artist should displace this work onto someone else? Anne had to find childcare for her baby for the prep day and the cooking day. As we ate lunch, I let everyone know this. Following this announcement, there was a renewed appreciation for the meal. Hiring a caterer meant that the time we would have normally spent preparing lunch could be used to do something else, presumably work in the studio. This provocation helped to amplify this power differential, highlighting the antagonisms between those who employ and those who work. MOTHRA has not hired extra help since. Instead we take turns every night to make a meal for the whole group, taking this work back into our own hands, and appreciating this collective effort as productive in itself.

As artists and parents, we are doubly hit with the notion of a labour of love. Capitalist society has convinced us that both care work and working as an artist are natural, unavoidable, fulfilling activities; therefore, we accept doing these things for little or no money.⁵ Art historian Helen Molesworth says that what the “artist genius” and “care work” have in common is the socially constructed belief that these are naturalized conditions—“myths of non-work that surround both forms of reproduction (artist as genius, mother as natural).”⁶

Having to do this necessary work alongside childcare during our artist residency further demystifies the idea of the genius artist in their studio, free of all social and domestic responsibilities. MOTHRA is unapologetic in our belief that this romanticized notion of the studio and artist residency has to be tucked up and put to bed.

Now let’s go check out one of the studios.

We head towards a junction where we will meet another long hallway. Above us are large vaulted skylights letting in the afternoon light. Studios are on either side of us.

On the bulletin board in the hallway is an homage to artist and author of the Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!, Mierle Laderman Ukeles. It is a note to all of the artists-in-residence passing through the building. It asks: “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”⁷ I put this poster here to remind artists that after their week of creativity, production, reflection, and epiphany, the work is not done. Someone still has to clean up.

Mondays at Gibraltar Point happen to be the change-over days, when one group leaves and another arrives. The note lists the names of some of the staff members who they see and don’t see, those who clean and maintain the building.

Ukeles is one of MOTHRA’s “aunties.” She helps us move around the conventions that weigh heavily on us as artists, those same ones illustrated by Virginia Woolf. Woolf tells us that genius needs “freedom” and cannot be encumbered by fear, rancour, and dependency.⁸ For Woolf, things must be just so in order to make great works of art. Ukeles champions artistic freedom as a switch to “freedom to” rather than “freedom from.” But what is this freedom? Why do we still talk about freedom from our kids? What about the freedom to bring them in, to include them in our lives as artists? Or the freedom to have flexibility in how this is, literally, put into practice?

After the birth of her child, Ukeles decided to become the boss of her boundless freedom. She said, “I became an artist to be free: free to use the gifts given to me by my artist heroes. In 1968, we were blessed to have a child and we fell madly in love with her. I became a maintenance worker, not only to do the work necessary to keep her alive but to do the work to help her thrive!” Ukeles discovered that her heroes, Pollock, Duchamp, and Rothko, didn’t change diapers. “I fell out of their picture,” she said. “I didn’t want to be two separate people—the maintenance worker and the free artist—living in one body.” So, Ukeles named her maintenance work as her art. She changed the framework of freedom.⁹

MOTHRA continues this train of thought. We make the most of our artistic licence, inherited from Ukeles and those who came before her, to be free to acknowledge children and childcare as intrinsic to our art worlds, our studios, and our practices.

But we also go further. We want to invert Woolf’s necessary conditions for art. We reject the idea that we need to be free from. All those “annoyances” and “inconveniences” – we want to admit them (i.e., dependent children) into our practices and lives as artists.

The social turn in art already enables us to acknowledge co-dependency and care – whether for our human dependents, or for the earth and other species – and now we have the freedom to bring the social world into the studio with us.

As we go to our studio, we will pass the library. On display is a book about the wave of revolution that swept the world in 1968. We’ll grab that book and head down the hall.

We are now in Studio 16, also known as Shadowland. This large studio faces the city. We can see some of the towers downtown in the distance just over the trees. Before us is the lagoon and the road full of bicycles and curious passers-by. Let’s sit in the bay window.

MOTHRA artists come from various educational, racial, and cultural backgrounds and travel to Toronto Island from all across Canada, the US, and the UK. While it’s mostly mothers who attend, a handful of fathers have attended, and more are applying each round. This project is incredibly transformative for the artists who participate, most of whom stay involved in the project. Artists feel empowered to keep working on their practices despite, and in tune with, caring responsibilities. The children feel valued and included. They witness their parent(s) in an artistic professional mode. It’s magic.

MOTHRA is creating a tradition to follow. Not only is it okay to be an artist and care for children; you might even find that this life-changing experience makes you a better artist by which your work is a valued contribution to the field. We can shape the future of art institutions and the art worlds that we are involved in.

Shall we go back to the beach now? Or maybe we don’t have to. Maybe we are there already… for literally, under the studio floor is the beach.¹⁰

Sarah Cullen is a visual artist who headed down the path of walking as a method for artwork, research, and alternative approaches to landscape. After the birth of her first child, she came to a fork in the road and took the diversion that eventually led to the creation of MOTHRA: Artist-Parent Project, which came to be in 2018 in Toronto. This diversion has since made its way back to the original path with many other forays along the way.

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1929), 4.
2.  Parenting often means “mother’s work,” not exclusively, but mostly. I interchange between mother/woman/parent. Ideally all parents are to be the primary caregiver at some point.
3. Recent studies include “Women’s Place in the Art World” (2019), led by Charlotte Burns and Julia Halpern, USA, and the annual “Representation of Female Artists in Britain” 
4. Hettie Judah’s chapter “The Culture” in How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and oOther Parents) (London: Lund Humphries, 2022), has many examples of this.
5. Silvia Federici, Revolution At Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (New York: PM Press, 2012), 16.
6. Helen Molesworth, Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2023), 98–99.
7. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART,1969! Proposal for an exhibition: “CARE”, 1969
8. Woolf, forward by Mary Gordon, viii.
9. Ukeles, Queens Museum presents Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art (New York: Queens Museum, 2016), 2.
10. “Beneath the cobblestones, the beach,” graffiti during the periods of protest in Paris 1968.