Cyril Connolly famously wrote, “Good art has no more serious enemy than the baby carriage in the corridor.” Have children, follow his arrogant motto, and your creativity is well and truly ruined. It doesn’t seem to bother him that great art has been made by parents for thousands of years, nor does the insult to those giving birth or their babies. As this magnificent traveling exhibition at the Hayward Gallery shows, reproduction itself cannot be a vital source of inspiration.
Acts of Creation is an extraordinary (and traveling) anthology of one hundred and more contemporary works of art that dive into the depths of motherhood, gripping, frightening, moving, and awe-inspiring from beginning to end. It opens with an object that activates the mystery. On a plinth lies a delicate yet strong form made of animal horns, twigs, steel and ocher-red earth, reminiscent of a woman’s pelvic anatomy. Thin silver wires pass between the gaps.
Wangechi Mutu’s sculpture explores the crux of gynecology with its allusions to bone, fallopian tube and speculum. But actually the title Improvement. It is a prayer for fertility and is itself a strangely beautiful example of fortitude.
This ideal beginning is paired with another beginning that can be heard even before entering the opening gallery. The soft wheezes of a newborn baby intertwine with his mother’s echoing call and response. But these sounds suddenly become poignant when you hover over the installation from which they emerge. Fani Parali recreates the neonatal intensive care unit incubator as a skeletal structure made of cold hard metal; Where the doll should be is instead a ghost depiction written in pencil.
A baby comes slowly, laborious labor is portrayed in sketch after meticulous sketch, the aesthetic midwifery of Ghislaine Howard. In Annegret Soltau’s photographic self-portraits, she literally alters the body, stitched and reformed. Even before birth, the miracle is strange. Susan Hiller documents her own pregnancy in 1977, inside and out, as an almost primitive topography, with pithy words and grainy photographs of her swollen stomach.
This is one of many classical works in the exhibition (one that caught Connolly’s attention). Here are Paula Rego’s brutally intimate etchings depicting Portuguese women facing the consequences of back-alley abortions alone, and an excerpt from Mary Kelly’s famous work. Postpartum DocumentHis son’s first words and attempts at writing are etched on the chalkboard.
Celia Paul’s painting of her son Frank being raised by his grandmother shows Frank filling the foreground, showing himself as just a glimpse in the mirror. Scenes from Carrie Mae Weems’ movie Kitchen Table SeriesIn the painting, where words and images blend together, it shows a mother and daughter at the kitchen table, with all kinds of closeness and sudden separation.
Superbly curated with extraordinary knowledge and sensitivity by writer and critic Hettie Judah, this program highlights new names as well as established stars. I loved Lea Cetera’s gorgeous epigrammatic hourglass; Its sinuous form extended into glass ovaries containing grains of sand that could never be removed. What a great play on lost clocks, stopped time and biological clocks. You can’t have it all is its title.
Leni Dotham Sleeping Madonna It shows a photograph of the artist in a red robe, with a baby at her breast; Self-portrait as a Renaissance archetype. But the image moves almost imperceptibly: just as the artist nearly falls asleep, the baby apparently falls over and begins suckling again. His satiation: his exhaustion.
Judah uses wall color to empathetic effect: warm reds for the early years, strong blue for reflections on motherhood and how it changes the whole life, soft whites for a gallery dealing with loss.
This could be the loss of a pregnancy, a baby, or a never-born child. Elina Brotherus’s photographic self-portraits chart the turnaround in IVF in all its isolating pains, including bitterly expensive drugs, the artist injecting herself next to the ubiquitous yellow box of needles, the mounting two-week wait, and the devastating decline of a negative test.
How to be an artist and a mother? Marlene Dumas offers her world-famous lonely heads, all obscure watercolor smears and poster paint, to her little girl to cheer up. In the chaos of overflowing paint pots, Jai Chuhan peels herself away from the canvas to get on her knees with her baby.
Billie Zangewa’s embroidered fabric collage – quite a generous title Each WomanThe glamorous mother figure in jeans and heels in the center of the image is surrounded by piles of garbage consisting of scattered toys. In her hand is an unnamed piece of silk (literally Zangewa’s medium) chewed by a baby.
What will you do with this new world you live in? The dull plastic sheen of bottles and pumps fills the canvas of Caroline Walker’s suspenseful still life. The unbreakable and never-ending bonds of motherhood come alive in Chantal Joffe’s double portrait, which shows her naked, sitting next to her clothed daughter. Hannah Starkey’s photograph shows a mother heroically walking through the snow with shopping bags slung over her shoulders from the yoke of a pole.
Bobby Baker Scheduled Drawings It is a fascinating tragicomic from early motherhood. A drawing of chips drawn on the carpet in five minutes; the soft nape of her child’s neck after her first haircut; His own head suddenly exploded. Most impressive is a brief sketch in which he tries to embrace himself: Relax YourselfAll in 20 lonely minutes.
Mystery, depth, love, grief and surprise: no work in this exhibition achieves anything less. And the absolute answer to the stroller in the hall is the revelation of humanity in Rineke Dijkstra’s quietly respectful photographs of young mothers holding their babies moments after birth. Tired, visibly postpartum, some still bleeding, all brave, proud, and protective of the new life they had brought into this world.
• Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood is at Arnolfini, Bristol until 26 May; followed by tours to Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham (22 June-29 September), Millennium Gallery, Sheffield (24 October-21 January 2025) and Dundee Contemporary Art (spring 2025).