invisible | indivisible
My daughter was born at the end of 2019. When she was nine weeks old we moved house, and a month later the country went into lockdown. Those early days were endless and quick; beautiful and confusing; clear and foggy. It felt impossible to do anything but get through each day, each hour, one at a time. We had flights booked to visit my family in Australia that August, and it became clear that we were not going anywhere anytime soon. We cancelled the flights.
Each day blended into the next in the constant exhaustion of early parenthood. We'd gradually find a little bit of a routine, only for everything to change all over again. I tried to get out twice daily for walks with the baby in her pram, full of anxiety about her being breathed on by joggers or cyclists or pedestrians. I didn't go to the shops for months - we decided it was safest for my husband to do the food shopping alone, and the cupboard slowly filled with odd things that we never used: a sushi kit, marzipan, caribbean spice mix.
We went on a parent survival diet of pastries, pasta, cheesecake, ice cream. We slowly emerged into an easier, healthier summer, only to retreat again into the brisk autumn, more cycles of lockdown, and lots of emergency chocolate. We had many conversations over Skype with my parents, and it became clear that we would not get to Australia that year. I watched the leaves fall, and tried to remember the smell of eucalypts and dust.
So many times during that first year I felt as though motherhood was something foreign; separate from me. It felt brutal as well as beautiful. I longed for my own mother; for my female friends; for conversations that weren't via screens. Time seemed a strange, slippery thing that constantly eluded my understanding. I existed from moment to moment. I was endlessly exhausted. I was surprised and pleased that I still wanted to work, but I couldn't work because everything was interrupted, all the time. My husband moved a small table into the living room to give me somewhere to attempt to work. I made some small things in the evenings. People asked me how we were doing, and I'd nod and smile and laugh slightly hysterically about not getting enough sleep. People said the things people say. You'll get through the exhaustion and it will be wonderful. It's all worth it. Your daughter is your ultimate creation. Don't worry about not working; you have this precious baby. This is your greatest work.
As autumn became winter I became angrier and angrier; frustrated and resentful that I couldn’t find time and space for my own creative life around the edges of all the domestic things I was responsible for. I couldn't find space to think, let alone make work. My daughter was still waking up every 2 to 3 hours at night, and I'd decided, after some doubts, to go ahead with making work for a solo exhibition. With a goal to aim for I decided I could do everything, and I was working in the evenings until midnight, facing a night of disrupted sleep, and then a day of unremitting domestic duties and childcare. I wanted the house tidy, the family organised, the floors clean. I washed and cleaned and cooked and shopped during the day and then carved lino prints late into the night. The tension between 'work me' and 'domestic me' grew and grew. I felt guilty about my divided attention, but I craved the old times when I could immerse myself in a creative project for hours or days, uninterrupted. I wasn't fully present for my daughter or my husband, and for every moment of creative work I felt like I became a worse mother. How I could be both artist and mother without splitting in two?
Motherhood has shone a bright, uncompromising light on all my dark places. I see how flawed I am. How quickly and easily my supply of patience is eroded; how close I am to anger at any moment. I see how much energy I have put into constructing my identity through my work; something which has caused a lot of frustration and unhappiness not only during this time of huge change, but actually over the whole course of my life. I see far too clearly how quick I am to blame others or outside circumstances for my unhappiness, instead of admitting that it is often me who is viewing things negatively.
In the end something just had to give - I'd become a really difficult person to be around, and I wasn't able to be fully present for (or enjoy) either the domestic or the work aspects of my life. I regret doing the work for the exhibition - it put too much pressure on me, and on our little family. I know that part of why I was striving to work was because motherhood had made me fear I'd become invisible: that my creativity and my professional identity had disappeared, or been buried, by domesticity. But there are simply not enough hours in the day to do everything. Initially realising that something had to give made me feel devastated. Almost like part of me had died. Had I given in? Given up? Who was I without my 'work'? I couldn't really tell.
A particular idea of work has driven me through the years; I can see I've defined, judged and valued myself through the lens of work. I'm a terrible perfectionist, which has helped me to achieve certain things, but has also held me back. It often delays (or stops) creative experiments. It is a state of mind that can create a huge fear of failure: I've often decided it's better not to do something at all than risk doing it badly. I worked as a performing artist for many years, and I think visual art was something I turned to when I couldn't resolve some of the frustrations I had with performance. I think I thought visual art could counter - defy almost - what is both the beauty and frustration of live performance. An unrecorded live performance is precious because it is so fleeting: it only exists in that moment, and then it is gone forever. Things go wrong. But you can make a painting and it might last many generations beyond you - you can even keep changing, improving and altering that particular object if you wish. But a live performance you have to let go of even as it is happening. You cannot return to it except in memory, and you cannot go back and fix anything that wasn't perfect, except in your imagination. It's a beautiful microcosm of the human condition. It is life: loss and risk and having to let go.
I began writing again sporadically over the last year. I wrote a lot when I was younger, but once I left school and started tertiary music study I only wrote every now and then, usually in times of crisis. Times where I sensed the end of one cycle and the beginning of another, and didn't quite know how to navigate the crossing. I wrote to think. Wrote to move forward. I was so tired that I just started writing without worrying if it was good or bad or even what it was for. It just felt helpful, and it was something I could do easily while my daughter had her nap, or in little odd moments during the day. I wrote by hand in a notebook, and sometimes typed into my computer. After a while I realised that I was picking up my pen and writing every day, filling the little moments I got to myself with an activity that somehow felt pleasurable as well as productive. And the more I wrote, the more I felt as though I could think again. It was as though I was writing myself through whatever this place was that I'd been stuck in for months.
After 18 months as a mother I'm slowly starting to feel as though I can move again. I can sense a new path starting to unfold. I'm dreaming of inhabiting my writing through storytelling and performance and songwriting. I'm asking myself questions, many of which I don't have answers to. What is work? Why do I want to create things? What are my strengths? My weaknesses? What excites me? What frightens me? What stories do I want to tell? What creative actions mesh with the strong belief I have that in order to get to something honest, truthful, essential, I must strip away, ruthlessly, all that is unnecessary? If I accept that I probably can't really earn a living from my creative work any more, do I still do it?
Back in 2015, after retreating from music and performance and spending several years working as a visual artist, I began to feel that I was stuck, both personally and creatively. I sought something less tangible, more mysterious, more challenging. I had an elusive sense of what that might be: to weave together words and music and a human body in a space to make a story. To push myself out of the comfortable little room I'd shut myself into and enter the wider world again. I'm sure it's directly linked to the huge changes of the last year and a half that I feel the desire to pursue that vision returning and strengthening. I want to jettison the heavy weight of all the paints, papers, pencils, canvases and endless indecision that has inhabited my studio for so long. To embrace the lightness and darkness that we are inseparable from. To be finite, transient, and inevitably travelling toward death. Making objects doesn't feel like the answer any more. I might enjoy creating one, but part of me then hates the fact that it exists. I have to decide whether to keep it, try to sell it, give it away, hold on to it, or destroy it. As soon as it's made, it becomes a burden. I'm a minimalist at heart: I want to travel light. I want to walk this path with only what I can carry on my back, and in my head and my heart.
Over the last month or two a new project has emerged. It's called Invisible | Indivisible. I don’t know yet where it will go. I’m just letting it unfold. Some performance ideas are percolating. As a mother I often feel invisible: that I am a function rather than a person, an anonymous entity pushing a pram. My work taking place for the most part out of view: expected by society, but not really consciously seen or valued. Perhaps somewhat taken for granted. During pregnancy I was indivisible from my child. I breastfed her for 14 months so wasn’t really away from her for longer than a couple of hours during that time. Even in this current phase we are still in many ways indivisible.
I work differently now. Work is part of life, intertwined with domestic necessities. I snap photos quickly on my phone in the little snippets of time I get during the day. Sometimes I take quick self portraits en route to the playground. I’m not really sure what passing cyclists and pedestrians think as I emerge from a rose bush while chatting to my daughter in her pram.
Metamorphosis is a painful process. I don't think you can truly change without some pain. As I realised viscerally soon after giving birth, having a child has brought a totally new and deep kind of terror into my life. I had plenty of fears before, but this is different: being wholly responsible for a tiny person's life and happiness, and being terrified of getting it wrong. Motherhood is the first time I've really had to sacrifice anything for anyone else; the first time I've really had to change or give things up that I thought were intrinsic to who I am. It is so hard to admit that I need to change: or rather, that I have to change. I am being broken down and gradually reassembled in a new form. Becoming who I need to be.