Art reviews: Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood | Depth of Field

In Acts of Creation at DCA , curator Hettie Judah sets out to affirm artists as mothers, and to assert their right to use their own experience in their work, writes Susan Mansfield

Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, Dundee Contemporary Arts ★★★★★

Depth of Field, Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow ★★★★

Metaphors of birth and nurture are common in descriptions of creativity, from the conception of an idea to the labour of bringing it into the world. At the same time, the notion has long been held (more by men than by women, it should be said) that actual conception and birth are enemies to art. Cyril Connolly’s “pram in the hall” remark might sound outdated now, but its effects continue to linger.

So Acts of Creation, an inspired and ambitious show curated by Hettie Judah for Hayward Touring, feels urgent and important. Fiercely and sensitively, Judah takes issue with the “blindspot” art has about “real motherhood”, sets out to affirm artists as mothers, and to assert their right to use their own experience in their work. She makes her case with over 100 works, arranged clearly in four colour-coded themes. The 60-plus artists are a broad range: British and international, young and old, famous and little-known.

Installation view of Acts of Creation at Dundee Contemporary Arts | Courtesy of DCA

The predominant image of motherhood in art is, of course, the Madonna and Child, an idealised, cleaned-up vision, far removed from visceral experience of birth and mothering. Judah sweeps this away in her first section, Creation, with breasts, blood and bodily fluids, from Camille Henrot’s “drippy” watercolours (her word, not mine) to Catherine Elwes’ breastfeeding film and Rineke Dijkstra’s shockingly vulnerable photographs of women taken just after giving birth.

Caroline Walker’s painting, Bottles and Pumps, lays bare the paraphernalia of feeding, while Wangechi Mutu’s fertility totem and Dorothy Cross’s sculpture of a cushion with cow teats summon the animal aspects of the experience. Lea Cetera’s hourglass of two mirroring wombs, You Can’t Have It All, puts the biology into the biological clock and Lindsay Mendick speaks frankly about Polycistic Ovary Syndrome.

Susan Hiller’s outstanding work, Ten Months (1977-79), marries daily photographs of her prone belly as it swells like an ever-waxing moon with brief lines of prose, including one of the best descriptions of pregnancy I’ve ever heard: “She will bring forth in time. Their ‘we’ will be extended, her ‘I’ will be altered, enlarged or annihilated. This is terror hidden in bliss…”

Installation view of Acts of Creation at Dundee Contemporary Arts | Courtesy of Dundee Contemporary Arts

The next section, Maintenance, explores the day-to-day work of child-rearing, again ranging widely across artistic media and approaches. Photographer Hannah Starkey depicts the mother as hero, trudging through the snow, her toddler beside her, shopping bags dangling from a broom handle across her shoulders. Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document combines her son’s first attempts at writing with her own deeply honest diary, capturing the maternal obsession with the minutiae of a child’s development.

Few works communicate the desire to keep a child safe as powerfully as American artist Cassie Anderson’s tiny school uniform knitted in kevlar, made in response to a shooting at an elementary school. Marlene Dumas juggles artistic practice and motherhood by giving half-finished paintings to her young daughter and inviting her to collaborate.

The section on Loss illuminates different aspects of experience, led by Elina Brotherus’ unflinching documentation of five years of fertility treatment, one dashed hope at a time. A young Tracey Emin speaks candidly on film about her abortion (“a mistake, but the best mistake of my life”) while Paula Rego’s powerful etchings of backstreet abortionists in her native Portugal were made in response to a failed referendum to legalise abortion in 1998.

In the final section, The Temple, on deep blue walls, Judah clinches her argument with a series of works, many of them self portraits, in which artists depict themselves as mothers. Some, like Catherine Opie and Leni Dotham, deliberately subvert the imagery of the Madonna; in Dotham’s Sleeping Madonna, she looks like she’s in a Renaissance painting, then as the painting reveals itself to be a film, drifts off into exhausted sleep, her baby in her arms.

Billie Zangewa’s Every Woman stands in a chic business suit amongst a chaos of toys and Lego bricks. Chantal Joffe depicts herself, naked, sitting next to her young daughter in a work which feels raw, honest and vulnerable. Renee Cox is a vision of motherhood as strength and muscle.

Everywhere in this show, the personal and the political are finely balanced. Cox’s work is political, a fierce response to the demonisation of black mothers. While there is much campaigning work here, and a room (appropriately enough, The Kitchen) devoted to feminist collectives, the power in this show lies in the personal, from Barbara Walker’s drawing of her teenage son on enlarged scans of the police dockets he received in Stop and Search incidents, to Anna Grevenitis’s surprising double portraits of herself and her daughter Luigia, who has Down’s Syndrome.

The show does such a good job of debunking the myth of idealised motherhood that you have to look harder to find the positives, but they are there: Joffe’s portrait of her daughter as a new baby which seems to have amazement in its simple lines; Paulette Johnson’s nude portrait Afterbirth; even the women in Dijkstra’s photographs are - while exhausted, befuddled and probably still in pain - also defiant and proud.

It’s a joy to see a strong themed show which knows what it wants to say and says it, offering up an endlessly broad range of work in support of its arguments. Acts of Creation is moving, interesting, continually surprising. Surely it should clinch the argument. I hope it will.

Portrait of Stephen Campbell by Leslie Black | Leslie Black / Courtesy of Street Level

Meanwhile, Depth of Field, a group show at Street Level Photoworks, celebrates the members of Glasgow Photography Group (GPG) who, in the period of 1987-89, were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the gallery’s founding. Varied bodies of work, mainly from the 1980s and 1990s, show the range of talent at work in the city at a time when showing photography in Glasgow barely seemed possible.

The famous name is David Eustace, who was a mature student in his late twenties when he was in GPG, and went on to live in London, then New York. The portraits here are from his Ego series, mostly shot for glossy magazines in the mid 1990s. Now they’re like a slice of history: Eve Arnold, David Frost, George Mackay Brown, a shaven-headed Trainspotting-era Ewan McGregor, a very young floppy-haired Hugh Grant.

Portraits from the early 1980s by Kay Ritchie have the same time-warping effect: Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Liz Lochhead, all looking impossibly young. Street photography of Glasgow by Alan Dimmick, Roger Farnham and Stewart Shaw (who died in March, and to whom the exhibition is dedicated) conjures a past that seems simultaneously close and far-distant. Shaw, particularly, captures the times: Aids posters, teachers on strike and the rollercoaster at the Glasgow Garden Festival. His shot of a pedestrian leaping a puddle to dart between two old-style corporation buses is especially memorable.

The works of Nigerian-born Oladele Bamgboye, exploring the black body in domestic spaces, feels the most contemporary, prefiguring the work of artists like Matthew Arthur Williams today. Agnes Samuel gives us poetic shots of Orkney, on a visit with the artist Bet Low. Robert Burns shows recent work of Ukraine, the last photograph showing an independence rally in 2012: another piece of history.

Freezing a moment is something photography does so well, and this show is a series of such moments, particularly vivid for those of us who realise we’re old enough to remember many of them.

Acts of Creation until 13 July; Depth of Field until 29 June