Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou

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The Mother & the Weaver

The Mother & The Weaver: Art from the Ursula Hauser Collection at the Foundling Museum, 22 September 2023 – 18 February 2024.
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I keep returning to the story of Arachne. To the story of a young girl gifted in the art of weaving. To the story of an ordinary girl, whose fingers threaded extraordinary tapestries. To the story of a mortal girl audacious enough to challenge immortal audacity. Motherless, she insulted a divine mother. Childless, she wove a continuous web of life. Arachne, the story of many women, the story of art and the story of us now.

Despite the sinister presence of Louise Bourgeois’ spiders in the Foundling Museum, The Mother and the Weaver does not directly open with Arachne’s story. This ancient myth of maternal inheritance and intergenerational exchange, of momentous metamorphosis and continuous creativity, is, however, implied in the works on show. Although the exhibition title distinguishes between the ‘mother’ and the ‘weaver’, each of the seventeen artists it brings together from Ursula Hauser’s collection conflates the one with the other, conveying the artistry in matrescence and the art that artist-mothers strive to make. Textile works by the likes of Bourgeois, Sheila Hicks and Sonia Gomes capture the mother-daughter relationship, as well as the gestational processes and bodily occurrences involved in maternity. Like her fate, Arachne’s touch is evident in the sculpted threads, beads and cloth bundles of these artists. Ever suggestive of the weight and potential of child-bearing and rearing, their soft sculptural works also depict the loneliness of the child and the emotional growing pains of children, as do the drawings and paintings of Ida Applebroog and Marlene Dumas. It is here, at the intersection of childhood and parenthood, of women artists grappling with one (being someone’s child) whilst becoming the other (being someone’s parent), that The Mother and the Weaver collapses the history of the Foundling Museum with that of the Ovidian myth of Arachne. Commemorating the original Foundling Hospital (which was established in 1739 by Thomas Coram), the museum holds and presents the histories of orphaned children, much like Arachne, in the form of material tokens and miniature trinkets. Literal strands from the past, fibres of affection and devotion, the textile archive, some of which is on display, is echoed throughout the woven works of the exhibition, and captures something of Arachne’s narrative, both as an expert weaver, a spider, and an orphan adept at the craft of her dead mother.
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Our first encounter is neither of the child nor her creative endeavours a la Arachne. Instead, we come face to face with the quiet anxieties of the mother, and the beauty and terror of matrescence. The title of Bourgeois’ diminutive but striking sculpture, The Good Mother (1999), speaks directly to the persistent fears around maternity and cultural expectations around gendered performances of mothering. The ‘good enough’ mother, Donald Winnicott’s theory about maternal availability to the infant, is alluded to whilst being deliberately elided. For Winnicott, the ‘good enough’ mother is she who tends to the needs of her infant but not to the detriment of the child’s gradually growing sense of the outside world. Slowly delaying the gratification of her child’s needs (by not rushing to assuage the hungry cry or the frustrated whimper for parental affirmation), the mother inadvertently teaches the child that there is a world outside of herself (and reminds herself too that there is still a world outside of the baby). Whether this world is one of unanswered, persistent or prolonged want, a world inept to answer the demands of an infant or match the devotion of a mother, remains for the child to discover. But by withholding her body, even for a short slip of a moment, the mother allows the vast body of the world – and of the self – to come nearer. In Bourgeois’ sculpture, Winnicott’s determining word ‘enough’ is consciously and cruelly omitted. The ‘mother’ in question is inherently, wholly and solely ‘good’, an all-available mother whose patinated steel body is held aloft on a cylindrical steel plinth. Standing upright, one arm upon a crutch, the other on her hip, perhaps habitually so, The Good Mother imagines something of the maternal position and painful processes of mothering when the Winnicottian determiner is not applied. When she allows herself to be ‘enough’, the mother is, paradoxically, ‘ample’, ‘abundant’, ‘adequate’, for baby and for self. When she is simply good, she denies herself the ampleness her infant desires and receives. This self-denial – extended in Bourgeois’ sculpture through the steel torso of the mother rising up into a canopy of steel branches which brandish bright blue beads entwined in wire – evidently hardens and petrifies. It isolates and fixes maternity into one of incessant self-abnegation in the service of perpetuating and prolonging the life of others (as seen in the proliferating branches of beads where a single head should be). Upholding the family line – or tree – Bourgeois’ ‘good mother’ is the pain of maternal goodness personified, petrified and terrified; that is, she is literally beaten (by the hand of the sculptor) into submissive motherly hardness. A pillar of impenetrable and unbendable idealised goodness, she stands forever more. Placed under a Perspex box, this process of self-disownment is solidified; the role of domestic and gendered servitude, wholesale goodness, is preserved.

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Of course, the hardness of the steel body does not metaphorically speak for the entirety of Bourgeois’ work. There is a personal element to these materials, one where Bourgeois as a child as well as a mother, is brought back into focus. Caring for her own ailing mother, who was an expert seamstress in the family restoration tapestry business (inferred by the cloth slip and beads), she in turn becomes the maternal figure. In making The Good Mother, she reflects on her mother’s lonely position within the family as well as the loneliness that comes in being a maker, a mother, of any creation. Is this the grown child’s unfulfilled longing projected onto and attempting to perpetuate and perfect the long lost body of the dead mother? Or the infant-turned-matriarch understanding the (self-)inflicted pressures to be maternal goodness absolute? In this, The Good Mother returns us to Winnicott’s theory, to the inevitable separation that must come in the midst of closeness between mother and child, to the maternal role eventually asked of, eventually inherited by, the child – though in the case of the orphaned children in the Foundling Museum’s distant past, this inheritance came all too soon. Legacies of loss as well as creativity also bring forth the motherless Arachne, whose dead mortal mother bequeathed to her abilities on the loom, much like Bourgeois’, but whose immortal mother, the jealous goddess Athene, condemned the over-confident and over-talented daughter-weaver to life as a spider spinning intricate webs. Here, the absence of ‘enough’ results in unremitting punishment, the separation between mother and child, mortal and immortal. The absence of ‘enough’, which should in theory create ‘adequate’ space to build trust, independence and attachment in the midst of separation, causes more than enough of a gap to cause irreparable damage to the relational and familial weave. Inheritance of this kind from our artistic mothers does not always result in fulfilment and rewards, praise or Perspex commemorations.

 

This complicated retrieval and revival of the mother’s body in the infant’s – perhaps an attempt to reawaken the ‘enough’ or amplitude of the good mother through artistic legacies – is realised again in Bourgeois’ renowned series of spider sculptures and drawings. Spider V (1999) crouches predatorily and territorially in a corner of the Picture Gallery, a space which recreates one of the first rooms from the original Foundling Hospital. Imitative of knitting needles – the thinner ends of which were considered not so much weapons as tools for connection, creation and continuation in the Bourgeoisian lexis – the spider’s spindly limbs skate on the parquet flooring, ready to knit or spring into action. Scaled down to the size of a crawling child, Spider V is less threatening than, say, the more monstrous of Bourgeois’ arachnids, such as the renowned Maman (also made in the 1990s), which is often seen towering over visitors outside museums and galleries. Made of steel – notably the same medium employed in the craft of The Good Mother – Spider V and its grotesquely gargantuan counterpart similarly capture the too muchness of motherhood and the over amplified/ ampleness implied by the too good mother, who is perhaps paradoxically the not good ‘enough’ ‘maman’ through simply being consistently and persistently there. Although her spider sculptures were an homage to her own mother (an ever mindful presence suspended and watching and weaving from above, post-death), Bourgeois understood the fear surrounding this big bellied maternal body. She understood the return it implied for the child (some female spiders consume their own mates, others allow their offspring to eat them). She understood the petrification that awaits the playing child around the preying parent. Crafting a net as well as a drawn distillation of threads, a spider’s web was as much a lair as it was a thrifty and nifty self-made refuge. Returning to the maternal body in the consuming unsegmented form of the spider, Bourgeois’ sculpture not only expresses the cultural phobias around it but embodies the conflicting parental-child dynamics (fear of displacement, rivalry, control etc.) in this territorial and predatorial creature. Spider V, therefore, brings forth Arachne’s story; it conjures images of a noose transforming into a translucent web, of hands turning into limbs, of a divine mother fearing the potential of a mortal daughter, and the spider child spinning her own webbed threat.
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Yet bellied beings, wombs, abdomens and headless, limbless torsos are espied elsewhere in The Mother and the Weaver. Whether in Bourgeois’ own soft sculptures – pink infantine fleshy forms, with their Frankenstein stiches, grimacing in their own stuffing and suffering under the scientific glaze of glass vitrines – or Alina Szapocznikow’s opaque and almost undistinguishable polyurethane work, Ventre-coussin (Belly Cushion) (1968), the embodiment of motherhood and its grand metamorphoses (from conception to pregnancy to labour to breastfeeding and nursing and beyond) is ever present. The potential of the gravid ‘belly’ is, subsequently, a taunt, a torment but also a tantalising prospect. Unlike Bourgeois’ impermeable steel forms which solidify the pressures surrounding maternity and convey the weight and difficulty of mothering, these cloth and foam bellies – abstractions of wholeness, reductions of a working whole – take us into matrescence itself, into the biological and existential reality of what it is to harbour life within and be reduced to this sole process while doing so.

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It is here that we come full circle – or rather to the centre of the web. Taken from Ursula Hauser’s collection – a collector who was inspired by her own mother’s crocheting and whose daughter sews too – the art shown in The Mother and the Weaver gifts us the heavy load that is motherhood today. But it also posits a way forward, an incontrovertible step towards creative acts of care that go against the capitalist weight of it all. Strand by strand, thread by thread, these artist weavers, the Arachnes of our times, depict the complexities of motherhood, the ‘enough’ or not ‘enough’ realities of mother-infant relationships, the gaps and ruptures between parent and child that seem impossible to fill, as well as the gifts one generation imparts to another. Sometimes these gifts are covert, as seen in Bourgeois’ series of red silkscreens printed on sheets of music paper, entitled Lullaby (2006), where a concatenation of filled-in shapes and obscured objects signify the first words between mother and child perhaps, the spoken words unspoken by the infant but registered and returned in gurgles and sounds, a preverbal exchange partially, gradually, verbalised. At other times, these gifts are overt, bundles and pebbles and webs that we can hold, caress and weave too by connecting with these artworks and listening to the carers who are at once the mother and the weaver.
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Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou is a writer, the founding editor-in-chief and general arts editor of Lucy Writers, and is currently writing up her PhD in English Literature (and Visual Material Culture) at UCL. She regularly writes on visual art, dance and literature for magazines such as The London Magazine, The White Review, The Arts Desk, Plinth UK, Burlington Contemporary, review 31, Club des Femmes, The Asymptote Journal, The Double Negative and many others. From 2022-2023, Hannah will be managing an Arts Council England-funded project for emerging women and non-binary writers from migrant backgrounds, titled What the Water Gave Us, in collaboration with The Ruppin Agency and Writers’ Studio, which has already resulted in an anthology of the same name. She is also working on a hybrid work of creative non-fiction about women artists and drawing, an extract from which is published in Prototype’s 2023 anthology, Prototype 5. Find her on Twitter @hhgsparkles and Instagram @hannahhg25.

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