Rupture & Repair
I am delighted to share that I recently had a work selected for an online exhibition and zine called 'Cut, Torn & Mended,' which launches on May 16, 2023 (World Collage Day) at Spilt Milk Gallery, a social enterprise based in Edinburgh with a mission to make motherhood more visible by promoting the work of artists who identify as mothers and empowering mothers within the community through artist-led activities.
When I saw the call for submissions to this exhibition I felt drawn to submit works as collage was my ‘thing’ when I was a practising artist, this will be the first time in 29 years since I last exhibited my work, a significant moment for me personally. Here, I share a little more about my transition from Artist-Mother to Yoga Teacher, Space holder. Now I hope to allow both to coexist.
As an artist and yoga teacher, I have held spaces that honor the creative process within motherhood for over 25 years. My own journey as an artist changed once becoming a mother of two small children in the early 1990s. Despite years of creating and selling work, I experienced a rupture in my art making process after the birth of my second child when I found it more and more challenging to continue juggling these different parts of myself. The demands of motherhood and an art world that questioned one’s role as an artist once a mother, led me to take a break from making art. I quite swiftly found a creative outlet that felt more compatible alongside parenting this was within my own body through the ongoing practice of yoga, which I loved and had first discovered at the age of 21 on arriving in London post art college.
When I became pregnant in 1990 I was lucky enough to be gifted Janet Balaskas’s Active Birth book and then discovered she offered prenatal yoga locally in her home. I trained with Janet and others from 1995 to 1997 when my children where small. The revelation for me was how differently yoga could support my pregnant and postpartum body compared to my younger self.
Over these past decades, I have held space for women to come together in circles during pregnancy, motherhood, and beyond, encouraging them to discover the creative process involved in mothering. Creating a supportive community through yoga classes and workshops is highly important to me. I also interweave information about birth and mothering in my Yoga for an Embodied Pregnancy, New Baby & Me Nurture, and Women's Yoga classes, as well as in my Our Bodies, Ourselves workshops. My aim is to help women honour and meet themselves where they are on their journey with kindness and acceptance.
Recently, I rediscovered my artwork and revisited my artmaking to begin repairing the rupture that occurred decades ago. Through stitching, wax sealing, and reassembling pieces in new ways, I have created new works born out of found papers, handmade papers, and original pieces. My making process engages the senses and is tactile in nature, invoking a sense of touch, smell, place, movement, and light. There is a link here to elements within my teaching of yoga through the senses, looking inward and listening to our inner landscape as well as using our senses to navigate the space through which we move our bodies.
As a short-sighted person, I realise how this has focused me in on details while intuitively placing colours, textures, and memories side by side. I have a love of typefaces, and motifs, and patterns are often present in the works that emerge organically, much like the yoga I share, to move in a more organic way honouring the spirals within us as we move and breathe.
Now a Nana to my two grandchildren, I am even more aware of the passing of time, so for me, there is no time to waste! Moving forward, my aim is to continue weaving together these different threads of art-making, sharing yoga, and building community within my daily life. While continuing to have dialogues around the idea of 'mothering as a verb' and acknowledging there are 'many ways to mother.' Through this effort, I hope to support and nurture women while exploring the many ways we can embody creativity and motherhood.
So why do I call the works rupture & repair? a number of reasons, firstly the works come about by folding, tearing and reassembling using a sewn stitch here, a blob of wax there. Secondly a referral to the rupture in my art making and the repair that has begun in making work again and finally you may already have guessed a nod to the term ‘rupture & repair within parenting and relationships.
“Your body is the ground metaphor of your life, the expression of your existence. It is your bible, your encyclopaedia, your life story.”