Artist Sarah Cullen (ON) reflects on MOTHRA: Artist-Parent Project, a residency and network for artist-parents and their children, designed to question dominant ideas about care work.
Sarah Cullen
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.
“Labour is a well-explored topic in contemporary art—it is the subject of annual festivals, the dedicated focus of art centres, and the premise of exhibitions, performances, and documentary projects. But it is also a tricky topic. […] Increasingly, artists who deal with representing labour also have to navigate the dematerialization of work, and find ways to bring the often-invisible aspects of contemporary labour (from technology to resource exploitation to gendered and racialized work) out into the light.”
