Greetings From Motherland, 2009-2013
Greetings From Motherland is a series of multi-disciplinary collaborative community arts projects that I made in response to feeling isolated after giving birth to my daughter in 2008. When I emerged from my post-partum haze, I thought that I couldn’t be the only one who was so disoriented after I became a mother. It felt as if I had emigrated to a foreign country, one in which I didn’t speak the language or know the culture. I doubted myself often.
Greetings from Motherland became a collective artistic exploration to remedy that. Over four years, I brought six groups and dozens of women together in Toronto and Madison, Wisconsin. Together, we questioned, investigated, shared, and played using our real lives as mothers as the raw material, and created some honest representations of motherhood in the process.
To make new pieces, I developed ideas and collaborated with mothers in free workshops of different lengths. No experience was necessary, and childcare was provided. Each week, we used photography, writing, sound, book arts, sewing, and other mediums to produce work about our daily lives as nurturers and to see what emerged. As the artistic director, I created the structures for people to experiment within, and guided the overall vision as the pieces evolved. Many of the final works were interactive, and when we exhibited what we created, the pieces continued to grow and change, as the audience added to or interacted with them.
The following works were created as part of Greetings From Motherland:
Greetings From Motherland was generously funded by The Canada Council for the Arts, The Ontario Arts Council, and The Toronto Arts Council.
