In India every woman is a Mother Devi with a potential for actual motherhood. I discovered this in my late twenties after part-time mothering four offspring of an older man. The desire to be a mother was deep inside of me as a performa for finding a nest, a common ground with my species who came before me, who met me with swollen bellies in the streets, and even in my own RISD print studio where the faculty of men seemed so attracted to a pregnant woman. This fascinated me even though secretly I knew I would never bear a child.
The love of my own dear Mother came in fits and starts. Sometimes I felt she was my truly my Mother and at other times I was sure that I had landed in the wrong household by some mistake and not in the place divined for me. I was not beautiful and dainty like her. What powers brought me to her womb that was cut open to deliver me safely? The girl with curly light brown hair she wanted so desperately to grow up with her son? How could I ever have a child that would fulfill the grand scheme of things as she imagined it? I had no imagination for it at all. My toys were crayoning books and pots and pans I used to cook meals while my Mother worked longer hours. I spoke to those pans more than any well-clothed doll as they fascinated me with their utilitarian capabilities. The doll never spoke back to me, just stared with vacant eyes. I adored my kittens more –maybe I was a cat woman who had fallen away from the forest?
So what to do with an itch that you do not have, but most of your girlfriends and female population seem to have? I’ve learned that birthing comes in many forms, perhaps none of theme as excruciatingly as painful as natal childbirth, but painful enough; that taking joy in developing a seedling into a fuller grown entity, and feeling its challenges and resistances, that watching something grow and leave you is as powerfully purifying and fulfilling as the path of traditional motherhood.
I love the concept of potential motherhood. It serves to unite women from their basic roots; its charge brings light, beauty, imagination and profound care as it structures history, legacy and the future. Some carry a seed in the womb directly. I have chosen to carry the water that feeds the womb, to walk along side, for every sister needs a helping hand, and what more could I ask than to be a lending hand?
How my studio practice informs my work from this potential leads me to the ongoing question: how do we comprise our own history from our ancestors within us? This is one of the most valuable and challenging explorations and questions of our lifetimes, since we all bear that core question. As an artist and educator I am rooted in my belief that every person has a creative life and my responsibility is to recognize and foster these creative lives both in myself, the individual, and in communities. This belief led me to create and direct a non-profit art center, Pyramid Atlantic, that grew from being a center for the making of prints, papermaking and artist books to an international center for cultural exchange where artists from all over the world have come to work and exchange ideas through formal dialogue and informal conversation. I believe that print studios offer a democratic voice and are committed to diversity, collaboration and entrepreneurship. I also accept the notion that conceptual art empowers printed media, and that prints and artist books have always been linked with validating ideas.
As an artist my deep interest lies in the intention to unite highly personal images with a measure of social commentary so that is where the core question about comprising our own history from our ancestors fits in. In working I trust that somehow I can create a record of personal dimensions that demonstrates the relation of shared, borrowed, and processed cultural experience within the codes of visual and verbal form.
As a community activist I truly believe in developing the understanding, particularly of women’s lives and history, by the means of a folklorist approach rather than external fact finding and research only, which means drawing out the underlying experiential life of the individual. In our lifetime what seems to tie us all together is both our relationship to the arts and our experience in crossing borders. My own creative work is dedicated to re-examining perceptions and interpretations of art and culture by searching narratives in art, myth, ritual and gender struggles of others and seeking ways to create experiences for enhanced understanding. It is my belief that we all cross borders and we are all immigrants.
This all follows me in the studio as I begin the/my artistic practice. I always seem to work out of personal chaos and some irreversible reverence for my process. I am concerned with materials, not only the way they look, but the way they are. Possibly this comes from recognizing that the endurance of hand papermaking, my major initial media substrate for my work, is also a hybrid of so many complex parts—which dedicated communities have worked to sustain its legacy and usefulness into many parts of the world— and that provides valuable insights (and challenges) to me as a contemporary hand paper artist dealing with current social issues. Most days I wish I had a whole village to work with!
That said, I begin beating fiber, preparing plates or ink or shuffling sheets of images on paper around in sequences until I get started. From there I will go to my Mac and pull out images from my camera (my drawing tool) or create text blocks and initiate several images. I always remember artist John Wood telling me how his studio featured many images in process under glass and that he would go back and forth to his images, never satisfied with working on just one. That idea of the image being held down until it is fully born, parallels my putting sheets of paper under felts while wet, blotters as they are drying, drying rack when printing, or under binding boards for pages of a book. The process of these steps in making, developing and hiding away until a reality comes together satisfies some of my tremendous creative anxiety as I work. I sense this period of development does not fall far from many of the emotional steps in pregnancy.
Another confession is that I am a movie and media consumer. Probably I watch a movie as many nights as possible and never miss 3 international news stations, with two cats purring on top of my lap, to achieve a recognition that I am part of society and not working in isolation.
The gristle of my work does come from readings, conversations, discouragements, fears, and mortality, as well as enthusiasm. So much of my work lies on the floor, literally, or is not completed, since I cannot work myself into a state to gather the amount of resources that I might want for bigger projects. That type of creative energy goes into my curatorial work and teaching. I’m sure this is every artist’s dilemma, in various dimensions, as we all re-invest whatever resources we have back into our work (our children).
I am struck by Ellen Dissanayake’s premise “My paleeoanthropsychobiologocal view is that in order to include human history, human cultures, and human psychology, art must be viewed as an inherent universal (or biological) trait of the human species as normal and natural as language, sex, sociability, aggression, or any of the other characteristics of human nature.” So what does that provide me as the maker—my frustrations, joys, anger, uncertainties, dreams and constructed images/ realities? I think the artistic practice cannot be left out of my life, whether I am imploding the images in a solitary way or in collaboration, even if the end result may be appreciated by a limited audience, Because it seems as normal to me as making my bed in the morning, equally demanding in discipline, care, structure and image application/finality, so I can sleep well at night and pull the trigger again the next day.
So I do not respond to those who point a finger and say, “she does not have a personal life, she always puts her work before anything.“ Secretly I knew as a child sitting on a stump in the country side that motherhood takes the form of dreams, dreams manifested in images, performed also with the hands of other energetic and devoted women, with the hearts and minds of the potential Devis all over the world and I knew I would hold hard and fast to that. The potential Devi calls me every day. It calls me into the studio to struggle with birthing images, to accept transformation, to honor failure, to surrender to reconstruction and vulnerability, and yes to set free my self-determined children who demand full attention when I am with them and who settle into place in secret quietude or other’s hands when released.
-Helen Frederick
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This post is part of the (Pro)Create Anthology, a collection of narratives about the intersection of professional studio practice and parenting.
(Pro)Create Anthology 