The Stink of Motherhood is an artwork comprised of photographs from 2020-2022 and confessions from daily postcard journal entries that were mailed in 2021-2022.
These photographs and journal entries —crossing the worlds of the imagined, fantastical and the mundane of lived experience—were each mailed to anonymous recipients throughout the world. The dispatches act as both a record of their time and a record of the indelible traces we leave upon each other, knowingly and unknowingly.
It is often said that being a woman artist is not easy. Many of us also feel that being a mother and an artist is damned near impossible. In late 2021, I had the distinct displeasure of hearing the phrase “The Stink of Motherhood.” As it was told to me, this phrase refers to the stench a woman artist gives off when she tries to make art about her domestic life; even worse is art about her children and the domestic environment created by becoming a mother. The implication is that, unless you are Mary Ellen Mark, you are not making good art or possibly even real art and you are certainly not contributing to the canon of significant art. The further suggestion is that there is nothing original, inspiring or thought-provoking in the well from which an artist-mother/mother-artist takes inspiration, if what she produces has anything to do with her situation as an artist-mother/mother-artist. There is also a keen whiff of embarrassment, shame, and pity attached to this situation.
That this struck such an offensive chord is in part because I intuited it way before I heard it spoken aloud; it speaks to the value we put on certain creators of art. Even though the content of this book—the photographs, the postcards—was born and activated during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, the subjects it addresses resonate beyond this period: the minutiae of time passing, and female consciousness as it struggles between the fluidity and the frustrations of motherhood, artistic ambition, domestic incumbencies, and restless personal and political longing.
In her book The History of Art Without Men, art historian Katy Hessel writes “Artists pinpoint moments of history through a uniquely expressive medium and allow us to make sense of a time.” What started as a way of connecting with people during a pandemic became a project about the complexity of motherhood and its intrinsic dualities: themes of hope and disaster, stoicism and impatience, apocalypse and delight, revolt and despondency. The book became a way to create secret constellations among these dualities, and to work out one mother-artist/artist-mother’s understanding of how she fits (or doesn’t fit) in the world created through these photographs. This book takes umbrage at while also embracing the anxiety-ridden and also wonderfully mysterious stink of motherhood.
