From 9 March 2024 Eileen Cooper’s work will feature in the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood.

In response to the exhibition, and of a theme that has been central to Eileen Cooper’s work for decades, a cohort of art world mothers and friends of Eileen were invited to take part in this online exhibition. Each of them was asked to comment on their lived experience of motherhood. With few rules or guidelines these mothers have kindly provided thoughtful, provocative, and at times painful, versions of their own very personal views on this uniquely female experience. Eileen and I thank them for their trust, their bravery, their creativity and honesty.

Kathleen Soriano, Curator
March 2024

For me, Eileen Cooper’s Putting Down Roots recalls the fragmentation of the self experienced by many mothers – the feeling of still being the same person but also of having changed entirely.

It is common to describe a new mother as having lost her sense of self, as though the new identity erases the previous one. Putting Down Roots instead suggests multiple selves co-existing, each contributing to something rich and complex – look at all those roots and branches and bodies entwining!

Motherhood suggests a stage of life, but once unlocked is of course a lifelong state that shifts over time. As a term it still makes me think of the baby stage – the irony of Eileen’s Sleep – an impossible elusive goal in the early years.

A time when time dissolves around you – day and night merge – anything seems possible and yet getting through the day is a miracle. I had a wonderful boss in the years preceding motherhood who explained – ‘You don't really sleep for eight years’ – a joke perhaps, but I came to know what she meant.

I may have had the biological needs to make a human but I was not equipped for motherhood and I was pretty much in denial about the role for the first three years of my son’s life, where I lived with a constant anxiety that I was going to kill him by doing something wrong. 

Every time I thought I have this covered I know what I am doing, the goal posts changed and we were straight into another phase of quickly learning new skills to be able to be present and a mother.

On becoming a mother I came to the realisation that I had a deep rooted, unconscious, anti-feminist view of the role of a mother that is excruciatingly patriarchal. Like, the value of a mothers labour is somehow less than that of one's success in the professional, male dominated world. The lack of funding for childcare and the national pay disparities are not helping that notion either.

Childbirth may shatter you into pieces and while I allowed myself the time and grace to recover physically and mentally, I still feel divided into two parts.

To present a balanced fight between two dichotomies. Firstly, I am reading The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness by psychiatrist R D Laing, which contrasts the experience of the ‘secure’ person with that of a person who ‘cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy and identity of himself’, who consequently contrives strategies to avoid ‘losing his self’. Feelings and motivations derive from this condition of ‘being in the world’. Without this we suffer ‘ontological insecurity’, a condition often expressed in terms of ‘being dead’ by people who are clearly still physically alive. Laing argues that psychosis is not a medical condition, but an outcome of the ‘divided self’, or the tension between the two personas within us: one our authentic, private identity, and the other the false, ‘sane’ self that we present to the world.

A sort of comparison to the madness of personal alienation – being alienated from oneself. Something like the idea of the ‘Internal Crisis of Motherhood’ as referenced by Sylvia Plath’s poem, Morning Song. An assault on the senses – from the moment of labour and birth, an out of body experience that can leave you in recovery like the survivor of a car crash. A feeling like the world has just burst through the body, or, depending on the birth, been sliced out. Through love but also doubt, darkness and a crisis of confidence.

Perhaps to undergo an existential re-birth, via confronting the reality of existence itself.

A past self, a past body, a past life – now has to be mourned. A new self has been born or replaced with the leadened experience of that of generations of mothers who I cannot relate to. Stepping away from my own singular experience obstinately and acknowledging a shared experience of societal pressure and pain of women at large. I acknowledge an internalised misogyny. Something like the madonna-whore-complex – a psychological complex where men see women as either saintly Madonnas or debased whores. Men with this complex desire a sexual partner who has been degraded (whore) and cannot desire the respected partner (Madonna).

Motherhood has been overlooked in art history, as there is scarcely anything bigger in real life than raising a human being. I, like many others, have experienced the guilt that comes with wanting to be with your children and a desire for a career. Blinded by love for them, but also exhausted, oscillating between feeling trapped and blessed by them. 

One day after school, her small son asked ‘Will you be dead with me, at the end of the world? Does it hurt when you get dead? Our teacher told us about that today. You have to hold your fingers together flat and straight up, like this – look! you aren’t looking! – then you say Amen, we all had to do that. I want something to eat, we only got carrots for lunch today’.

This is a story of friendship and growth. How empathy can gently take you in different directions. Because, what a new mother needs, above all else, is empathy – an understanding that the overwhelming responsibility of parenthood comprises daily heartache and joy, that every endeavour to shape and nourish a life plumbs the depths and reaches the extremities of human emotion.

I didn’t think, after the birth of my second child Margot, that I would make new friends. But then I met the artist Eileen Cooper in a chance encounter at a traffic light near our houses. We first came across each other on the cusp of spring when Margot was weeks-old, when her breath was cloud-like, and eyes still blue. On the discovery that we were almost neighbours, Eileen invited me over for a cup of tea with her customary warmth. Our friendship can be measured with Margot’s milestones: smiles, laughs, her body unfurling like a flower from a tight new-born ball as weeks, then months passed. Eileen inhabited a mother’s sensitivity, ensuring I had coffee, tea, ginger biscuits at hand, offering me lifts home during sudden rain showers, taking Margot while I rearranged myself after a feed – patient with the whimpers and mews of this small creature. She would look into Margot’s eyes and discern how light they were, striking given her half-Chinese ethnicity, and then note with an artist’s assurance (and a smile) how creative she was going to be.

It was during these meetings that we’d enjoy long conversations, about the way her imagery mythologised the modern woman, the experience of liberation and loss as children grow up, or just about what we’d done that day. After a few weeks, Eileen said she had an idea for a mother-baby drawing, would I be interested in taking part?

Remembering the transience of this period of motherhood I was immersed in, I said yes. And so, one April morning Margot and I find ourselves in Eileen’s drawing studio, her son Sam’s old bedroom on the second floor. I’m invited to sit in a low, blue chair with sloping arms. The light is bright, but not overly so, tempered by the ashen clouds overhead. I settle Margot, who is fascinated by Eileen’s sculptural face and calm demeanour, to face outwards, perched on my knee. Eileen is swift. She outlines my hair and face with charcoal on paper: the round of Margot’s head, strokes of blue for her eyes, the impression and knot of my fingers.

When my two sons were very small and parenting was a struggle someone gave me great advice. She said, ‘You only need to be a good enough mother.’ This has stayed with me, it helped me keep things in perspective and to stop being hard on myself, as I think all mothers are.

It now seems so long ago, 40 years since I had my first child, now I have grandchildren. Reading  the quotes from some of the younger mothers who have generously written about my work, I’m reminded how raw and intense it is, joyful yes – without a doubt, but anxiety, exhaustion and loss of self are all here.