Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document: Documentation VI, Prewriting Alphabet, Exergue and Diary, 1978, is included in Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood at Arnolfini, Bristol.
Curated by Hettie Judah, the exhibition runs from 9 March to 26 May 2024.
The exhibition will tour to Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), Birmingham, 22 June - 29 September 2024; Millenium Gallery, Sheffield, 24 October 2024 - 21 January 2025; and Dundee Contemporary Arts, Spring 2025.
Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document is a six-year exploration of the mother-child relationship. When first exhibited in London in Kelly’s solo exhibition at the ICA in 1976, the work provoked tabloid outrage for incorporating a series of stained nappy liners in the installation. Each of the six-part series concentrates on a formative moment in her son’s mastery of language and her own sense of loss, moving between the voices of the mother, child and analytic observer. Informed by feminism and psychoanalysis, the work has had a profound influence on the development and critique of conceptual art.
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Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood explores the joys and heartaches, mess, myths and mishaps of motherhood through over 100 artworks, from the feminist avant-garde to the present day. While the Madonna and Child is one of the great subjects of European art, we rarely see art about motherhood as a lived experience, in all its complexity. Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood will address this blind spot in art history, asserting the artist mother as an important – if rarely visible – cultural figure.
Featuring the work of more than sixty modern and contemporary artists, the exhibition will approach motherhood as a creative enterprise, albeit one at times tempered by ambivalence, exhaustion or grief. Acts of Creation will explore lived experience of motherhood, offering a complex account that engages with contemporary concerns about gender, caregiving and reproductive rights.
