Hettie Judah is chief art critic at the British daily paper The i, a regular contributor to The Guardian’s arts pages, and a columnist for Apollo magazine. She writes for Frieze, Art Quarterly, Art Monthly, ArtReview and other publications with ‘art’ in the title, and is a contributing editor to The Plant magazine. Following publication of her 2020 study on the impact of motherhood on artists’ careers, in 2021 she worked with a group of artists to draw up the manifesto How Not To Exclude Artist Parents, now available in 15 languages. She regularly talks about art and with artists for colleges, as well as museum and gallery events. A supporter of Arts Emergency she has mentored artists and students through a variety of different schemes. As a broadcaster she can be heard (and sometimes seen) on programmes including BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Art That Made Us. Recent books include How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (Lund Humphries, 2022) and Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones (John Murray, London, 2022/ Penguin, NY, 2023).
Hettie is curator of the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition ‘Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood’ ,which opened at the Arnolfini in Bristol on 9 March 2024. Her book of the same title was published globally by Thames & Hudson in Summer 2024. In 2022, together with Jo Harrison, Hettie co-founded the Art Working Parents Alliance - a supportive
network and campaigning group for curators, academics, gallerists, technicians, educators and others working in the arts.
Among Women (in mulieribus)
‘The end is built into the beginning,’ Trish Morrissey tells us in Eupnea (2023). Across each birth is cast the shadow of death. The film begins and ends with descriptions of human respiration in the first and last moments. Footage of bleached and denuded trees shiver in evocation of the branching tracts of the lungs, now gasping into life, now rattling out of it.
Morrissey often structures her work around principles of mirroring – most literally in Rosa, Irma and the Sandman (2016) in which she re-performs period photographs of identical twins. The life and death duality of Eupnea is not contained and symbolic but raw and urgent, reflecting the hallucinatory terror of mothering a seriously ill child. Nerves taut, Morrissey is stalked by images of nightmares from when she had covid that reappear as though recollections from waking life. ‘Remembering is not the opposite of forgetting’, she says. It is tempting to read the world according to neat binaries, but life will not be so ordered. Mess, fear and human unpredictability intrude.
More doubling. In the self-portraits of The Maiden and the Crone (2017–) Morrissey positions herself side by side with her daughter over seven years. This duration covers the daughter’s transition into and through puberty, her passage toward womanliness offered as a theoretical counterbalance to the mother’s journey through menopause. Morrissey’s wryly self-deprecating title frames this very contemporary mother and daughter according to archetypes borrowed from the Middle Ages. The maiden embodies virgin potential and the promise of new life: in art her exposed body is positioned as a memento mori, rosy flesh stroked by the skeletal finger of death. The crone, in the hands of Albrecht Dürer or Hans Baldung, is a piteous grotesque, mocked for inappropriate lust, reviled for unnatural powers.
The Maiden and the Crone acknowledges the circularity of life, but also illustrates the limits of trying to fit human existence – and more specifically womanhood – into a smooth arc of blossoming and decline. Some days we feel tired. Some months are bad. Spring comes. A woman who at times feels feminine might at others lean towards androgyny or indeterminacy. Granted, Morrissey’s hair grows greyer, and her daughter taller, but The Maiden and the Crone says more about variability than progression.
The older woman as spectacle – a cultural figure set apart – reappears in Joanna Southcott’s Box (2020). Southcott was both virgin and crone: a West Country religious seer famed as a prophetess in the early 19th century. Aged 64 Southcott announced that she was carrying the messiah. She died shortly after her predicted delivery date, most likely from disorders that had caused her abdomen to swell as though pregnant. Her prophecies were left in a sealed casket, to be opened at a time of national crisis in the presence of 24 ordained bishops. Morrissey-as-Southcott casts a weary and complicit look. The red box is positioned suggestively - the revelations contained within, by implication, are those of female sexuality and reproduction.
The mysterious workings of the female body are associated with mental disorders – the hysteria once through to arise from the uterus. Psycho Beach (2008-10) is a serious work that carries its title with one eyebrow raised. Morrissey appears in deserted coastal locations during her pregnancy with her son. Water stands in for the habitat of the unborn, and the unstable territory between land and sea for the condition of the maternal body as it splits from one being into two. As with Eupnea, in this marginal territory death hovers close. Morrissey knows the child she carries is seriously unwell. She appears naked, pregnant, carrying her older daughter across rocks towards the tumult of the sea on the Gower peninsula. It is an image into which can be read either maternal affection or imminent harm – possibly both.
The uncanny quality of pregnancy – and its associated taboos – are teased in Ave Maria Karaoke (2010). Late in her third trimester, bump tumescing through a white t-shirt, Morrissey delivers a spirited rendering of Ave Maria, eyes closed in cod sincerity, rubbing her belly sensually as though balladeering from the Vegas stage. Mary, who was ‘blessed…among women’ was rarely depicted visibly pregnant and remained a virgin before, during and even after birth. She is the ideal that all mortal mothers will fail to live up to, much as Morrissey pre-emptively sets herself up to ‘fail’ in her mic-less karaoke performance.
What choice is failure or success? What separates the two? In The Failed Realist (2011) and The Successful Realist (2017), Morrissey locates the experience of success in the belief that we control actions and circumstances. In both series, she offers her face as a painting surface to her daughter. In 2011, aged five, there is a frustrating gulf between the outcome desired (Totoro, Pretty Ogre, Sleeping Beauty) and that achieved. Six years later, this young artist’s fine motor skills have started to catch up to her ambition, and the transformations she wreaks on her mother range from the modish (Emoji (Love Eyes)) to the inventive (Cyclops Twins).
Control can only extend so far. Eupnea and Hospital Drawings (2021) reflecting at different intervals on the heart surgery performed on Morrissey’s son in 2013. In its own way, each is a work of embodiment. Throughout Eupnea, the artist performs breathing drills focussing on the body’s ability to take up oxygen, and the implications of that not being possible. For the Hospital Drawings she returns to interpret photographs taken of her son in intensive care, to place herself again in that state of vulnerability. Drawing and breath work are not only ways to think through, but to better understand the limits of control within an uncontrollable situation. To hold something in the body and release it. To create a delicate thing and trust its care to others.
1 There was a short period in Italian art of the 14th and 15th centuries during which the Madonna del Parto appeared as a popular subject, of which the most notable example is Piero della Francesca’s fresco of 1460.
