The Art of Motherhood – An Exhibition of Resilience and Strength
The Art of Motherhood exhibition, held from October 6-8, 2023, at Stretford Public Hall, showcased the remarkable creativity of Trafford’s mothers of all ages. Inspired by real-life stories of motherhood, the exhibition highlighted the strength and resilience of mothers during times of crisis.
The exhibition celebrates the diverse experiences of mothers from across Trafford during COVID-19 and World War II.
Click on each of the artworks below to dive into the exhibition online. By selecting an artwork, you can explore detailed images, read about the creative process behind each piece, and gain insights into the themes and stories they represent. Enjoy a virtual tour of the exhibition at your own pace, and discover the unique perspectives and artistic expressions of the mothers involved in this project.
Unique Stories of Motherhood: Community submissions
Full title: Unique Stories of Motherhood
Artist: Community submissions
Date made: 2020-2021
Medium and support: Collaborative collage
Overview: We put a call out for unique stories of motherhood during two pivotal periods in history – COVID-19 and World War II. We invited all mothers to submit a photograph that captures a moment during the COVID-19 pandemic or World War II, along with a brief narrative describing their experience. It could be a heartwarming family moment, a story of courage, or a touching memory that still resonates today to capture the challenges mothers have faced during times of crisis.
A Mother. With every piece of herself she wants to give up.
She wants to:
But she can’t.
A mother is the definition of strength.
A mother is re-born.
None tell you about that place…
They talk about the birth and the baby and the joy and the pain
But they don’t tell you
How much you will change
But one day you feel it
And you don’t know how you got here.
Because you were surviving
And you lay on the carpet for one minute for comfort
Until something inside you says;
Get up.
Name: Anon
‘waiting ‘time’
My son sleeps. I can hear him breathing. His breath soothes me.
Rhythm catches me, I begin thinking. I am thinking of waiting. Post COVID, the world’s relationship with waiting has changed. The NHS, the cooperation, my phone company, the shopkeeper, the nurse, demand I wait. I phone. I am met with a recorded greeting. The recorded message informs me, as it did yesterday, and will tomorrow, due to COVID, staff shortages, I must wait. ‘Waiting time is currently 44 minutes….’
My son sleeps. I can hear him breathing. His breath soothes me.
Name: Gretchen
Age: 44
A brief moment of calm before the storm. I’d gone through an emergency C-section to have my daughter and was fortunately recovering well. The hospital experience was traumatic but getting home wasn’t much better. My baby was perfect, but no sooner were we home than my partner and his family all caught COVID, my parents were isolating and I was left taking care of a newborn and recovering from surgery completely alone. I couldn’t allow myself to stop and think about what would happen if my partner passed away, or if I caught it or my beautiful baby, I just powered through. Fortunately, everyone was okay and I feel so bonded to my daughter after that experience but what should have been the happiest time of my life, surrounded by love and family was one of the loneliest and scariest times of my life.
Name: Rachel
Age: 33
Moment of Calm: Community zine
Full title: A Moment of Calm
Artist: Project participants
Date made: 2023
Medium and support: Collaborative zine
Overview: This is a collaborative zine created by groups from a young parents group (Talkshop in Sale) and adults from an assisted living venue (Adlington House in Urmston).
A Moment of Calm – Participant zineExhibition Artwork: Submitted by project participants
Full title: Behind Her Eyes
Artist: Project participants
Date made: 2023
Medium and support: Paint on canvas
Overview: Step behind the canvas and look through the eyes of motherhood.
Full title: Cloak of Resilience
Artist: Project participants
Date made: 2023
Medium and support: Embroidery, paint, felt tips
Overview: These squares have been made by many local mothers since January 2023. The idea behind the cloak is that mothers wear a cloak of resilience and push through when times get tough.
Full title: Mothers’ Memo
Artist: Project participants
Date made: 2023
Medium and support: Ink on paper
Overview: A living piece of art that invites mothers to express and reflect on their inner lives.
Full title: PerspexTIVE
Artist: Project participants
Date made: 2023
Medium and support: Perspex and ink
Overview: Leave a comment/add a feeling that the exhibition has provoked in you.
Full title: RESILIENCE
Artist: Project participants
Date made: 2023
Medium and support: Embroidery
Overview: These are things that make us as mothers feel more resilient.
Full title: Weight of Motherhood
Artist: Project participants
Date made: 2023
Medium and support: Interactive display
Overview: Add a label, try on the bags and see how much motherhood weighs.
Full title: World War II Trunk of Treasures
Artist: Project participants
Medium and support: Collection
Overview: In this trunk, you will find some personal items from participants from World War II. We have also included some of the documents we used to stimulate ideas for the performance. The trunk also included archive material from the People’s History Museum, which generated discussions and ideas around the role of mothers and balancing childcare and work in times of crisis over the last 100 years. This fed into the devised performance, Motherhood Unscripted, about the incredible resilience of mothers during times of crisis.
Exhibition Artwork: Submitted by local artists
Full title: Balance
Artist: Lena and the Sea
Date made: 2023
Medium and support: Ink on paper
Overview: March 2020.
Full title: The Work is Never Done
Artist: Lena and the Sea
Date made: 2023
Medium and support: Ink on paper
Overview: March 2020.
On the Tuesday it was my daughter’s fifth birthday.
On the Saturday we had a family gathering planned to celebrate.
We were nervous about hosting, but there’d been no official advice about gathering in groups. I also had an 8 year old son. I had an 8 week pregnancy in my belly. I started bleeding at the party. The last gathering we would have. For years. I went on to lose that pregnancy. A miscarriage. My second.
My husband came with me to the hospital to find there was no heartbeat. We were told to come back in two weeks to see if there was any fetal matter remaining. It was awful. I was so glad my husband was there with me. Had it happened a week or two later I would have been alone.
We went into lockdown soon after. School closed. Homeschool. Stay home. Stay safe. Stay apart. No hugging, stay 2 meters apart. So many restrictions.
My husband continued to leave the home, be exposed, work as normal. In a way it was better for us. We weren’t stuck on top of each other at home. I felt like I was drowning in childcare but I didn’t have to rush anywhere. Time changed. We had to fill all of our time, together. We didn’t have a garden, but the sun shone and I spent long hours out on the front step with the children and dogs. Lots of chalking and bubbles. Lunch and little games. Sometimes there was a neighbour on their step too. We all got to know each other. We embraced the slow down. Our worlds got really really small. Our hair got long. That was lockdown number one.
We realised how connected we usually are. This thing connected us and divided us in a new way. It definitely got tiresome. We didn’t know from one week to the next what the rules were going to be. Christmas was cancelled. School was open. School was closed. You could meet, but in small groups. Test, test, test. No funerals, no weddings. No celebration. No visiting people in care homes. We did this dance for a long time.
When I fell pregnant again it was July 2020. I attended appointments alone. I was so worried about losing the pregnancy and what if there was no heartbeat again and I was by myself? He waited in the car outside, anxiously. He felt helpless. Returning outside with the relief of a healthy pregnancy and those scan pictures you get. I sobbed.
There were so many restrictions in place when my daughter was born, a week early.
You could only be accompanied into hospital if you were over four centimetres dilated. As if dilation really means anything when you are in labour and need support. I opted to give birth at home. The midwives wore masks. I was lucky to not have complications. It wasn’t my first baby, I had breastfed before. There were no weighing clinics, no playgroups, no children’s centres. If I hadn’t already had the chance to make a solid haggle of mum friends I would have been so so isolated. My experience was better than some, worse than others. A collective experience, a group trauma; separately.
~ Lena and the Sea
Full title: COVID-19 newspaper clippings 2020-2022
Artist: Rosarie Walsh
Date made: 2020-2022
Medium and support: Newspaper clippings
Overview: As a way to cope, and a way to document the craziness that was going on around me, I started a workbook with COVID-19 paper clippings. COVID continued on a lot longer than I hoped/expected and finally, I decided I would stop on the second anniversary of when lockdown was announced in the UK on 23rd March 2020.
Full title: Doll-Face Umbilical
Artist: Simi
Date made: 2010
Medium and support: Found objects assemblage sculpture
Overview: “The work comments on my feelings of other-ness and isolation being a dual heritage Caribbean/English pregnant mother living in a 97% White British society and the institutional racism I encountered within healthcare and within interactions with civil servants as a teen mother.
It is part of my Umbilical and Encounters and Documents series of work where I used found objects in an exploration of identity and the ‘Rasquasche’. This is a spanish term utilised by artists such as Amalia Mesa-Bains who describes Rasquasche as where…
‘the irreverent and spontaneous are employed to make the most from the least… one has a stance that is both defiant and inventive. Aesthetic expression comes from discards, fragments, even recycled everyday materials… The capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado is at the heart of rasquachismo.’ (Mesa-Bains 1997 p.1)
If I relate Doll-Face Umbilical to the Lockdowns I think of the overwhelming obsession and attentiveness of early motherhood where love and anxiety is intensified and could spill over to a magnification of an urge to be ‘a Good-enough mother’ leading to obsessive compulsive checks on our children’s welfare. How the fear of COVID-19 would have altered our ability as mothers to relax into an easy relationship of natural bonding with our children. This was a time where self-scrutiny and the mirroring gaze of our children, in the absence of a wider community could become overwhelming.”
Full title: Finding solitude (in brief moments of caring)
Artist: Claire Weetman
Date made: 2023
Medium and support: Pencil on A3 paper
Overview: Sitting on an old dining chair in the middle of a field, generously giving myself permission to read, Roland Barthes compares familiar landscapes with the maternal body. “There is no other place of which one can say with such certainty that one has already been there.” If this place of the maternal body is so connected to everyone, then how does a mother find moments of solitude?
Time alone is often precarious, balanced between commitments like climbing the branches of a tree; never actually unconnected from potential interruptions; found in the dreary pilgrimages that are part of our daily routines. But maybe a seat balanced in the branches of a tree sometimes feels better than having nowhere to rest at all.
Full title: Landing Lights
Artist: Claire Weetman
Date made: 2023
Medium and support: Hanging sculpture/artist’s book Digital drawing on paper, machine-cut lettering, wood, cord
Overview: Responding to the needs of an infant child in the dark; being in the house more during maternity leave; watching the seasons change by the light filtering in through windows during pandemic lockdowns; these things have informed Landing Lights. This hanging sculpture takes the form of a window blind. A digital drawing is based on observations of light filtering through the slats at a window and this has a poem cut into the concertina-ed printed paper.
Full title: Lockdown Love Token
Artist: Becky de Lacy
Date made: 2020
Medium and support: Handmade Bonded Liberty Lawn Jacket, Cardboard Mobile and Photos
Overview: The reason I made this jacket? I wanted my daughter Connie to have a physical symbol of my love in case I died.
I finished the jacket in April 2020 a day before her third birthday, it was the early days of lockdown life. I knew deep down three weeks would turn into what felt like a lifetime, there was so much racing through my mind so thought I better get cracking with the jacket while I had the energy. I took a lot of care over the process, bonding the fabric, hand stitching the buttonholes yet I don’t think I’ve ever made anything so fast. There was an urgency to finish this project unlike many I’d started before. When it was ready, I managed to convince Connie to put it on and we played upstairs where I took these images of her, the shadows cast from a mobile we made earlier that week. She never wore it again, even at three she had a strong sense of her own style. These were the magical days of early lockdown (my crafting soon diminished) but also the start of months of anxiety and stress. I’m grateful for the good memories, good health, a safe home, a loving family and a job. I will always think of those mothers/women and children who lived a very different life behind closed doors.
Full title: Measure Once, Cut Twice
Artist: Marie Jones
Date made: 2020
Medium and support: NHS scrubs & bag, voile fabric & rainbow thread.
Overview: “Reflection of my experience in lockdown.
I felt glued to the TV. The rest of the time, I was batch-making scrubs and masks for family, friends and strangers on the frontline. Nurses and police officers in Wales, people volunteering in soup kitchens in New York and large batches handed over to scrub sewing groups locally. I felt the fragility of our social systems but an awesome power in the people coming together regardless, to make things happen and help one another.”
Full title: M32
Artist: Liz Newell
Date made: 2020
Medium and support: Graphic design
Overview: “The pandemic was a really scary time. I had just returned to work after maternity leave, and my son had been at nursery only two weeks when the first stay-at-home order was announced. Juggling work between my sons naps became the new normal but it kept me busy and distracted me from the chaos of the world.
It was hard but we soon adapted and Stretford became not only our home but our world.
This piece is a celebration of Stretford, warts and all. Our daily local walks forced me to look harder and appreciate what had already been under my nose. This is a place that is packed with personality, from runaway trolleys and stolen bins to beautiful buildings and nosey neighbours.
These are the windows into my life. I heart M32.
This artwork was produced as part of @StretfordStreetArtClub. A local art collective set up during the pandemic to brighten up the streets of Stretford.”
Full title: What’s on TV
Artist: Marie Jones
Date made: 2020
Medium and support: 100% cashmilon 4-ply acrylic
Overview: Grandma’s 1st lockdown shopping list. Machine knitted from a photo of a handwritten list on spiral bound paper sent through WhatsApp on 24th March 2020. It is titled What’s on TV as throughout all of the lockdowns, this was the only shopping list from Grandma that didn’t have What’s on TV listed on it. It was her first shopping list and so, she had already bought her What’s on TV before we even knew what was coming.
