Lenka Clayton's Maternal Economy

Abstract

‘Lenka Clayton’s Maternal Economy: Performances of Wonder and Respect’ is a provocation piece in which I conduct a selected reading of the artist’s multidisciplinary maternal artworks and collaborative performances through the lens of my reflections on my mother’s caring and generosity of spirit in her performance of the maternal. I discuss their affinities of kindness, curiosity and concern toward others that Clayton has brought to collaborative and transactional performances outside of the mother-child dyad, as with her experimental, global support structure for artist-mothers and artist-fathers, The Red Thread Project. I argue that it is precisely this ethics of the maternal, this caring for and about others, that is critically necessary to call into action in response to the the hateful political climate brought to the surface locally and globally by the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States of America. I argue that in the nightmare of this recent post-Orwellian state of affairs that has brought in a demigod capitalist and his neo-Nazi ideologues who are rescinding the civil rights of women, mothers, immigrants, people of color, ‘foreigners’ of every kind and color, and people who do not easily conform to binary categories unless they have investments in the Trump (mis)fortune, dissenting citizens including myself need the endurance of kindness and the ethics of caring and justice that operate at the foundation of Clayton's collaborative performances and artworks.