The Enduring Maternal Gaze

When my mum first held my new baby, she said something like ‘you will never not think of him.’ Now he’s 22 and just left home and I think I know what she means. Becoming a mother marks a shift from subjectivity to intersubjectivity where the self is always divided and shared with an ultimately unknowable other. This new self is in tension with patriarchal neoliberalism that centres the individual. Ironically mothers, presumed to be naturally selfless and nurturing, also struggle to reconcile their individual selves. Framed thus, time spent pursuing an art practice is seen as somehow transgressive and selfish, the roles of carer and creator placed in opposition. But many artist mothers continue to challenge these assumptions: to realise the generative potential of motherhood, the ethics of encounters with strange dependents and the power of the long view of an intersubjective, maternal gaze.