Caroline Walker features in 'Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood'
Hayward Gallery Touring's major group exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood platforms the joys and heartaches, mess, myths and mishaps of motherhood through over 100 artworks, from the feminist avant-garde to the present day.
Featuring the work of more than sixty modern and contemporary artists, this exhibition approaches motherhood as a creative enterprise, albeit one at times tempered by ambivalence, exhaustion or grief. Acts of Creation explores lived experience of motherhood, offering a complex account that engages with contemporary concerns about gender, caregiving and reproductive rights.
The exhibition addresses diverse experiences of motherhood across three themes: Creation, which looks at conception, pregnancy, birth and nursing; Maintenance which explores motherhood and caregiving in the day-to-day; and Loss, which touches on miscarriage and involuntary childlessness, as well as reproductive rights. The heart of the exhibition is a series of revelatory self-portraits - a celebration of the artist as mother.
Featured artists include Caroline Walker, Tracey Emin, Ghislaine Howard, Barbara Hepworth, Chantal Joffe, Claudette Johnson, Catherine Opie, Celia Pail, Paual Rego, Jenny Saville and Monica Sjöö.
