Picturing the Maternal Body

Abstract

A few years back I took a hiatus from academic work in the area of feminist collaborative art and domestic representations to write a memoir. I’d recently become a mother, and the book traced the generational experience – how my emotional heritage, derived from my mother and her mother in turn, played out in my own practice of raising a daughter. My Jewish grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, having escaped to Siberian work camps, giving birth to my mother en route back to ravaged Poland. My mother was a refugee before knowing what home was. In later years, in Canada, both my grandmother and mother became compulsive hoarders, stuffing their homes with Kleenex boxes, used skirts, purses, newspapers, hanging on to all things in the fear they may be taken. They built protective nests around them, but ones that blocked me from them, emotionally and physically. The book traces how I birthed myself out of these cluttered wombs, these concentrated domesticities, in order to find a degree of subjectivity and be able to give birth myself. Entitled ‘White Walls’, the project dwells on the spaces in which motherhood transpires, sites that create personal subjectivity and hold generational inter-subjectivity, sites of fantasy and fear, that hurt and heal.