This week, a committee of the Freelands Foundation chaired by art critic Hettie Judah held a talk on ‘How not to Exclude Artist Mothers’ and released a set of guidelines for institutions and residencies. Unfortunately, motherhood is still not compatible with the demands of the art world.
In 1973, in the year that I was born, and my mother gave up her job as a doctor to stay home with me, American artist Mary Kelly gave birth to her son. Kelly struggled to combine artmaking with the slumbers of motherhood: the constant feeding, the dirty nappies, the gibberish baby talk, the laundry. So she decided to make it the subject of her art.
Divided into six sections and 135 objects, Post Partum Document tracks everything Kelly’s son did or produced during the first five years of his life: stained liners from the inside of her baby’s cloth nappies, feeding charts, her son’s early drawings, transcripts of his first words. Using the theory of linguistics and psychoanalysis - most prominently the readings of Jacques Lacan - Kelly painstakingly catalogued and annotated theses specimens of baby- and toddlerhood and framed the 135 objects as if they were artefacts in a science museum. Refusing to represent the female body itself, Kelly instead presented motherhood as a psychological and social process, thereby transporting it into the realm of the male-dominated discourse of objective science.
Almost fifty years later, UK artist Lana Locke found herself in a similar position as Kelly all those years ago – at home with two daughters under five, swallowed up by the demands of domesticity and childcare. The burden was made heavier by the recent Covid-19 lockdowns.
Locke’s film Journeys of a Laundry Mountain (26 minutes and 49 seconds long) moves between the artist’s neat garden in a gentrified area of London and the rural landscape of Queensland, Australia, where her parents live. Having begun filming herself hanging the laundry in London, she found herself doing the same in her parents’ garden when she and her family visited them in the Winter of 2020.
The film has the feeling of a documentary. ‘We call it the Laundry Mountain: the result of multiple loads of washing dumped in one spot’ the artist voice reports. ‘Working from home, I guard against the domestic taking over in terms of my labour. I make such calculated risks that segregate the laundry as little as possible.’
Lana Locke, Journeys of a Laundry Mountain (2020,) Video 26 minutes and 49 seconds
We move from the artist’s London garden with its flimsy, temporary structures of the laundry racks, to her parents’ overgrown garden in Australia with its makeshift water supply arrangements and a half-finished swimming pool covered in dead leaves. Locke is standing in between the green weeds with her four-year-old daughter, who is helping her sort the clothes. It is a moving scene; mother and daughter at work, chatting. But the voice-over tells a different story. ‘Sorting and separating each subject’s clothes creates some temporary structure and order… But how do I escape perpetuating the gendered role of mother with my daughters?’
The London and Queensland scenes are interspersed with short film clips: a painting by Poussin of women doing the laundry by a lake, a film clip of two white, suburban women in America discussing the merits of a new bleaching product. Locke highlights the normative and restrictive nature of doing the laundry, and its underlying, sometimes racial connotations of whiteness and purity and cleanliness. There is archival footage of British people arriving as immigrants in Australia, with their territorial ideas of claiming the land, just as the laundry rack claims its place in the garden. It soon becomes apparent that this film is about much more than the laundry.
When Locke visited Queensland, in 2020, wildfires were still raging in nearby Victoria. We follow Locke and her family as they visit the ravaged forests in Queensland, where the fires have died out. There is her oldest daughter again, in a summer dress and sandals, marching over the dead branches. ‘This is so boooring’ she exclaims, repeating it like a mantra, as if visiting the site of a natural calamity is just another chore, like helping her mum with the laundry. Locke retorts, in a serious but motherly voice. ‘Don’t you think it’s scary that the planet is burning?’
Pangolin-Bat (2020), Mixed media relief; 26 cm x 47 cm x 9 cm
An Aboriginal firefighter appears in the frame. It’s bad enough that the Natives have lost their land and their identity, he tells us, but now, because of mismanagement, the whole country is losing its identity, too. ‘The wild we encroach on and seek to possess’ Locke’s voice-over muses, ‘like China’s pangolin’ (Locke is also showing a sculpture of a colourful Pangolin, made from bits of her children’s old clothes). And, seamlessly, Locke takes us back to the laundry, showing us the brown residue from the pipes in her parents’ house. ‘Whitening, purifying, cleansing, yet the residue keeps coming back.’
This film is clever, layering the mundane with colonisation and climate change, jumping from topic to topic like the forest fires that jump the trees. As in Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document., the domestic and the scientific are brought into the same realm. But where Mary Kelly subverted the visceral, messy nature of motherhood and made it minimalist and pristine, Locke does the opposite, replacing the white and pure connotations of doing the laundry with the messy and chaotic nature of motherhood, globalisation and life.
There is a lightness and humour in Locke’s film, an element of not taking herself too seriously. The film ends on a hopeful note. In London, Locke asks the rest of the family to help her sort through the laundry mountain which almost reaches the ceiling. A warm and messy scene full of jumps and laughter and tears ensues, ending with two little girls sitting in an empty laundry basket as if sailing to a better world. In Queensland, we see Locke’s daughter in the woods again. She picks up something from the forest floor and turns to her mother with an excited look. It is a green shoot, starting to grow again.
Journeys of a Laundry Mountain can be viewed online at Lungley Gallery until 8 April 2021
It is also shown at Exhibition: Equality Video Club at National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, Weiwuying, until 28 March 2021
Photographs courtesy of the artist