Labour Labour Labour

Rosie Mudge’s works on show at the Iziko South African National Gallery and SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, foreground the change in concerns and motivations that motherhood has brought to her practice as an artist.

Portrait of the Artist as a Mother is a fitting introduction to these themes. The work is the artist’s studio apron, moulded to the contours of her pregnant form. The absent body described by the apron is a complex moment in the motherhood journey. It is a particular outward symbol of an inward bodily change. Motherhood is a term swamped with romance for first time mothers, from the whale song and fairy lights envisioned at a natural birth to the happy snaps of glamourous postpartum women on social media. But beneath these idealized notions is a profoundly transformative coming into being of both mother and child. A change charged with the currency of labour. While the labour of motherly care remains woefully undervalued today, the labour of women while pregnant and mothering is unacknowledged. Derived from the artist’s experience that saw the need to produce work for galleries and exhibitions up until the day of her hospitalization for childbirth, the work reacts to the reality that the vast majority of South African women engage in paid work up until the day of childbirth, shouldering at times incapacitating physical symptoms in order to provide for their families.

Beyond the labouring of child bearing is the subsequent labouring of domestic and emotional child care that motherhood engenders. Portrait of the Artist as a Mother alludes to these forms of labour with further interrogations of maternal labour taken up in the accompanying works. In Motherlode, anonymous and fictional Whatsapp messages from mother support groups emerge as if in real-time from a group of receipt printers. This constant stream of words of care or helpful information evoke the relentless mental load of motherhood while the Unsent Letter, inscribed upon commercial invoice paper, points out the congruent demands on Mudge’s practice as an artist as on her person as a mother.

Can’t be a (Good Good Girl) Even if I Tried and Thanks for Making Me a Fighter, bookend the Iziko exhibition as signals of the impossible societal demands placed upon women. Good Good Girl is from a series of works in which near-invisible words are suspended within a banner made of chains. The viewer is tasked with walking around the piece to allow the text to reveal itself in the changing light. The phrase is omnipresent, even if only fleetingly visible, evocative of societal standards that pervade the subconscious, holding us to ungraspable ideals.

Both works incorporate text as fleeting, obfuscated by the materials used to inscribe it as a signal that the viewer is looking at something drawn from and formed by the subconscious. The science writer, Lucy Jones (2024), has brought the term matrescence back into contemporary thought as a means of describing the fundamental societal and identity shifts that occur when a woman becomes a mother. In order to reference the deep psychological shifts at play, Mudge’s works are characteristically laced with lines of text. She often uses phrases snatched from pop songs that replay in an interplay of coherent and incoherent moments across her canvases, evoking the way unconscious assumptions or conditionings come to the fore in our lives. The lenticular pieces made from individual pieces of glitter on paper, encoded with the phrases, “Stay Buried”, “Gotta Move On” and “Forever, Forever Ever, Forever Ever?” are a particular reference to invisible psychology at play in the artist’s transformation to motherhood with the added pressure from contemporary psychology that has challenged parenting styles in recent years. As we have come to understand the developmental mind of children, the pressure on new parents to face their childhood demons in order not to transfer traumatic or toxic emotional habits on a new generation suggests that raising children today is also about parenting oneself. Societal redress (environmental, emotional and physical) is at the heart of modern parenting with added pressure on the family nucleus to do things differently to the generation before them. The labour dichotomy suggested in other works finds form here in the title that is the number of pieces of glitter glued to the paper to create the piece; one of the artist’s most laborious processes to date.

Flowing on from the key work I Look to You And I See Nothing, the works in the SMAC gallery attend to intimacies and care in the artist’s life as a mother. The desire to look to her child without the projections of her own ego speaks to the quiet sacrifice of self that is implicant in becoming a parent. The artist’s recent focus on mirror neurons and emotional homemaking is evident in these canvases that evoke abstracted versions of the family unit in their physical placement within the gallery space. Individual and unique pieces hang clustered together to create a composite work, or lean and hide behind each other in evocation of familial bodily bondedness.

Mudge’s work on both exhibitions is curated from her personal collection as well as from new works created for the gallery. This format is fitting to the theme as it allows work made during disparate or challenging times when the congruence of motherhood and career was impossible, to return to the larger narrative of her artistic oeuvre shaped by her experiences as a mother. From the disjunct in societal expectations to the incongruency of motherhood within commercial machinations, Mudge’s works seek to elucidate the often unconscious forces at play in the life of an artist mother.

Reference:

Lucy Jones, 2024. Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood. Pantheon Books, USA.