For the last few years our practice has focused on the domestic. We have been using film, drawing and hand-written observations to record how our children’s play continuously alters our home environment. This blog records a series of discussions with artist and writer Judith Stewart. The discussions focus on how this work, made as and when family life allows, can be presented to an audience. These discussions are supported by an A-N New Collaborations bursary.
The book was eventually published on 6th July. We launched the book with a public discussion event at Outpost Studios. The topic was: what spaces does family life allow for creative practice?
Judith Stewart and Frances Williams (who each contributed an essay to the book) both came to take part. We were particularly pleased that six families came, and that there were different kinds of interactions going on simultaneously: playing, building things, drawing, dressing up, discussing issues of practice and parenting.
On our axisweb page there are further images of the discussion, and of the artwork we put up around the room where the event was held.
Judith Stewart’s completed essay was called ‘Whose Everyday? Politics, Ethics and Art’.
For several years we had been making a body of work about the tensions and creative exploits of domestic life. We had used drawing, written observation, film and photography. We hadn’t found a way to get the work into gallery spaces. In 2012 began to talk about a book as a way to get around this obstacle, a way to put the work into public view.
Judith’s essay spurred us on. During the spring (of 2014) we selected forty or so pieces from this body of work. We invited Frances Williams (at the time working as Head of Education at South London Gallery) to write an essay about the meaning of ‘family’ within government policy and gallery practice. We started assembling these elements and finding an order for them.
In this second excerpt from Judith Stewart’s essay she refers to our three children using their initials:
Whether it is possible to think of H and M as collaborators in this process depends on how one wants to define collaboration. Certainly their intellectual and artistic intent is not the same as an adult’s, but their contribution to the practice is vital and, to a greater or lesser extent, determines the development of the work. What is perhaps of more interest in this age of relentless screen presence is how this conscious involvement in making art will affect the children’s sense of self. To some extent it could be argued that this is no different to other families where a child’s every move is recorded for posterity, but the Townley and Bradby collaboration is an investigation. Taking part not only involves collaborating in the making but also in the analysis and reflection, so that arguably H, M and C will develop a more critical understanding of how images operate.
After Christmas Judith showed us a first draft of her essay. Here’s an excerpt:
Our cultural experience of images of childhood make us (particularly women) wary. How do we avoid the appearance, as well as the actuality, of sentimentality? Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document famously presented her experience of motherhood through the lens of psychoanalysis, but it is not Townley and Bradby’s intention to scrutinise the mother-child relationship. Rather, they consider the dynamics of the family as a whole. In spite of the changes that have taken place in our conception of what constitutes ‘a family’, it is still the basis of our social order. This means our economic structures still ensure that family reinforces the patriarchal order. It is the attempts to circumvent this, to negotiate a way of being (and becoming) in the world, that permeates Artists-As-Parents-As-Artists.
Between our visit to London and the on-rush of Christmas we had time for one more conversation with Judith. We compared the works in Home Truths with other works that reveal private interiors: Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh, Sophie Calle’s Suite Venetienne. Both rely on detachment from the subject. We return to Mary Kelly and the way she offers a view of motherhood seen through the ideas of psychoanalysis.
Towards the end of the conversation, as other duties are making all three of us feel we should conclude, Judith says ‘I don’t think your work has anything to do with the psychoanalytic approach. It’s more like the 1970’s feminist ideas about domestic equality. You’re trying to find a way to work and parent and make work that doesn’t put one of you ahead of the other.’ She says this as if it’s been on her mind for some time, as if she’s been meaning to tell us.
This commentary on what we’re doing is invaluable. It’s a considered statement, arrived at after several months. It’s informed, but it’s also from outside; it’s not an understanding we could arrive at between the two of us.
As Judith is leaving she tells us she’d like to write something about our practice and theories of the everyday. ‘I’ll give some dog-walking time to it.’ Later she explains that this is a precious part of the day: time when she is away from all other distractions, walking for half an hour, able to pursue an idea without interruption.
