This Body of Work is a multi-year project by the sense archive that includes an interdisciplinary gallery exhibition, a live performance, a series of community events, and a publication. The project explores critical feminist performance(s) of motherhood and maternal agency through lived bodily/cellular experiences. The work locates the body as the initial source and archive for the labour/work of the m/other and explores the themes of care, identity, trauma/loss, transformation, and lineage. We ask the questions: How do we/you experience motherhood? What is the work of motherhood? Who mothers? What are the practices that continue to sustain patriarchal ideations of motherhood in a liberal, capitalist, and settler colonial society?

The exhibition is made up of our individual works created during, and initiated through year-long Artist Residencies in Motherhood (ARIM). We have created works for the exhibition and span photography, sculpture, new media, sound, video, and performance. Becka Viau worked with us as a Curatorial Consultant for the overall exhibition. Her first summary of the exhibition has identified themes of personal lived experience(s) of motherhood, (changing) identity(s), bonds that connect us (parent, child, family), oral/object histories, collecting/holding, time, scale, memory, and re-membering. The exhibition, This Body of Work: rendering, reassembling, and performing motherworlds was first presented by eyelevel artist run centre, in collaboration with Mayworks K’jipuktuk/Halifax, at Saint Mary’s Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, May 26-June 18, 2023.

The performance work (in progress) is a relational, multi-sensorial, and immersive experience of the work/labour of motherhood, a worlding of sorts, and a durational installation that a small audience is guided through. Making this work challenges us to repattern disciplinary thinking about performance and performativity. What and who perform(s)? How does motherhood perform? We are distilling new materials, media, methods, and ways of working across disciplinary boundaries, exploring transdisciplinary approaches to making art in collaboration. Our performance work will be completed during 2023/24.

We employ the word “mother’ as a verb in our approach to the work and in considering our extended and targeted audience—an audience that includes all those who mother —grandparents, fathers, stepparents, gender neutral/diverse parents, adoptive parents, friends and chosen family, and caregivers of all sorts.

By occupying our homes and daily lives as spaces of/for creative residencies, to working at a distance via video conference, we are occupying new artistic, domestic, and virtual spaces. Exposing motherhood, allowing it to inform the work, feels risky. We realize it may be seen as having lesser aesthetic value and/or meaning, in a culture that supports patriarchal ideals. In exploring the geographies of care negotiated through motherhood, the invisible performance(s) of motherhood, the labour/work of the mother, we understand that the material may be complicated to confront.

Motherhood is integral to the entire creative process, shaping the work rather than impeding it. By working across disciplines, in community(s), and in unconventional spaces, we aim to create an inclusive and accessible project. We are expanding our individual and collective practice(s), opening new pathways for listening, making work, engaging in/with community and, most importantly, thinking with/alongside motherhood. As we produce the work as artists who negotiate the complexities of mothering, we make the work and are the work.

We gratefully acknowledge that the creation of This Body of Work has been supported by The Canada Council for the Arts, Arts Nova Scotia, Support for Culture, Dancemakers, and The Bank Art House.

From 2020-2023 the sense archive participated in: