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6(failing, good/bad) artist/mothers. We created a temporary community, which arrived atsome quick conclusions in relation to Live Art and Motherhood. Later on, Emily and Lenamade notes: Temporality and durational performance entail multiple and complex connections tomaternal arts practice. Whilst there’s a mutual resistance against dominant narratives in lots of our work,we recognize each other’s specific struggles. Issues of representation are not easily solved and they seem impossible to escapein/through performance. Action doesn’t necessarily need to be juxtaposed with performance; they might beone and the same thing. There’s a desire towards articulating the unsayable: a kind of admiration formonstrous, corporeal, viscous and excessive mothers.Inspired by everyone’s contributions as well as further research into maternal performancepractices we started dreaming about the creation of a new kind of maternal performanceaesthetics which would entail and complexify all of those issues as well as take intoconsideration maternal care, interdependency, a new sense of time and attention,repetition, boredom and thirst for new collaborations between ourselves and our children.We still continue to long for a new kind of maternal performance aesthetics, which wouldseriously consider the ethical and political dimensions of working with/about children, butalso fight for visibility of our own ambivalent and precarious identity formations asartist/mothers. We are hopeful that the work of the artists represented in these pages willhelp us get there.Emily Underwood-Lee and Lena Šimić

7Áine Phillipssex, birth & death (2003)sex birth & death, 2003. Photo by Nigel Rolfe.Áine Phillips is a performance artist based in the west of Ireland where she is head ofsculpture at Burren College of Art. She has been exhibiting multi-media performance works,installation and video in Ireland and internationally since the late 80s. She has created workfor multiple contexts; public art commissions, the street, club events, galleries and museumsincluding City of Women Festival Ljubljana, Kyoto Art Centre Japan, Stanley Picker GalleryLondon, Bunkier Sztuki Krakow, and Mobius Boston USA. She has been involved in curatingmajor Live Art and performance events in Ireland such as Tulca Live 2005-2007 and FutureHistories 2016. Her edited book Performance Art in Ireland: A History was published by theLive Art Development Agency and Intellect Books UK in 2015. Her work is supported by theArts Council of Ireland.www.ainephillips.com

8EroticismI created sex, birth & death in 2002 and performed it five times from 2003-2004 in Ireland,the UK, USA and Austria. It is my favourite performance work and I consider it the mostdeveloped, original and culturally significant work I have produced. The subject matter isabortion and motherhood - juxtaposing the two linked experiences and showing them astwo sides of the one coin. The deeper underlying theme of the work is eroticism which Iused to open up new readings of maternalism.In our (Northern European) culture this physical pleasure in motherhood is denied. In mypersonal experience giving birth was like an enormous orgasm and breastfeeding arousedsexual feelings in my whole body. I am sure I am not alone in these experiences. A sexual actbegins motherhood, why would the entire experience not relate back to sexuality? Iarticulate this correspondence in my script “Two who are separate become one, two whoare one become separate.”In sex, birth & death I consider the image of lactation to be a metaphor for female eroticism.The experience of breastfeeding is of a flowing (expression) of nourishing and deliciousbodily fluid from one body into another. The breast milk is both food and a form of pleasurefor both and links mother and baby in a symbiotic relationship paralleling and extending theunity of two bodies in pregnancy.In sex, birth & death I made what I hoped was an erotic performance of the representationsof maternal experience. I hoped the audience would feel my expressed pleasure in mymothering body and witness the maternal body as erotic. I also intended to explicitly linkabortion with motherhood and eroticism. In Ireland, abortion is illegal and Irish womentravel to the UK to avail of abortion services. 100,000 Irish women have had UK abortions,but admitting or talking about it publicly is still problematic. I wanted to normalise theexperience of abortion and place it along the continuum of female sexuality.Áine Phillips

9Anna FurseYerma’s Eggs (2003)Helen Spackman in Yerma's Eggs, 2003. Riverside Studios. Photo by Hugo Glendinning.Anna Furse is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths where she directs theinternational laboratory MA in Performance Making and is Co-Director of the Centre of theBody. Her career in professional theatre includes over 30 years as a director, writer, projectleader, programmer, artistic director, curator, consultant and educator. Artistic Directorshipsinclude BloodGroup (1980 – 86) and Paines Plough (1990 -95). She founded Athletes of theHeart in 2003 with a Wellcome Trust Impact Award. Her many collaborative projects includeworking with hospitals and health organisations as well as international venues, including coproductions in France, Serbia and Slovenia. Her most recent work has been shown at venuesincluding the Cantieri Culturali Zisa, Palermo, Live Collision, Dublin and GIFT UK festivals, andthe Michael Cacoyiannia Foundation, Athens. Anna is the editor of Theatre in Pieces – Politics,Poetics and Interdisciplinary Collaboration (Methuen 2011) an anthology of performance textsthat includes Don Juan.Who?/ Don Juan.Kdo? her co-productions with Mladinsko Gledalisce,Ljubljana (Shunt and Riverside Studios 2008). Her current project The Anatomy Act iscommissioned by CREATE Dublin (premiering Live Collision 2016).www.athletesoftheheart.org

10SubfertilityLorca’s poetic drama Yerma (meaning 'barren'), about a desperate childless peasant, wasthe catalyst for this exploration into the subfertile psyche. I wanted to get under the skin ofthe subject via the body in performance and reflect complexity and contradiction via alayering of elements. With Assisted Reproductive Technologies (A.R.T.), the human heartcollaborates with highly invasive medical technology. We are impelled to reconsider ourethical assumptions. We subject our bodies to a necessary splitting - the separation of eggsfrom ovaries, sperm from testes, reproduction from sexual intercourse - as our sex cellsbecome involved in a spectacular process of fusion and, if successful, growth outside us.Given the statistic that 1 in 6 couples suffer involuntary childlessness and fertility problemsin the UK it is striking how little such stories are told. But then, the subfertile tend toimplode, muted, suffering with gritted teeth out of a sense of powerlessness, failure, guiltand marginalisation. Our voices rarely come through into the culture. It was such silence Ichose to break. My more recent theatre research has reflected a subjective perspective in atriptych of very different projects on (non) reproduction and correlative issues since 2000.Yerma’s Eggs was inevitably a highly charged, personal work bearing the stamp of each ofmy collaborators. The performer’s body remained central, clothed and naked, screamingand whispering. The piece began with water, the source of life, and ended with the voice ofmy child. In between these lay the material of a performance that was inevitablyuncomfortable for an audience. The subject is rife with contradictions, particularly forwomen. Splicing together a medical and technological world with the visceral elusivenessand tenderness of physical theatre posed many but necessary challenges. To do justice tothe subject matter, machine and flesh had to be married. Medical imperative on the oneside and embodied emotion on the other are the dualities that the sub-fertile straddles,daily. We medicate and meditate. We inject and project. We imagine.3Anna Furse3Extract from ‘Performing in glass: reproduction, technology, performance and the bio-spectacular’, inFeminist Futures: Theatre, Performance, Theory, edited by Geraldine Harris and Elaine Aston (PalgraveMacMillan USA, 2006).

11Bean(m)other/ the untitled (2014)(m)other / the untitled, 2014. Venice International Performance Art Week.Photo by Monica Sobczak.Bean's work is predominantly performance led, working through the intersections ofinstallation, video and sound. Her work has been described as deliberately “accidental,scattered, scuffed, blurry and incomplete”, a statement that she ferociously upholds in herattempts to undermine systems of patriarchy & capitalism through the aesthetic, materialand durational choices within her practice. As both artist and curator she is interested inproducing work that is quietly yet overtly political, lacks linear narrative and challenges itsaudiences. She is interested in curating spaces and situations that connect artists, makers,thinkers and feelers and has done so through the creation of ]performance s p a c e [ andongoing research into alternative modes of existence, queer theory, post-feminist realitiesand queer domesticity.www.beaninthearchive.com/

12QueerBy having a child my identity was automatically perceived as less queer. However everythingin this child’s short existence has been done somewhat queerly: from their conception inthe van I was living in in East London, to their home birth, their gender neutral name andown (neither parents) surname. Furthermore I feel the process of becoming mother hasdirect alignments with that of queer, firstly and simply that it’s a state of transition andbecoming (that breeds new states of transition and becoming also).I felt incredibly othered during my pregnancy and continuously judged on my physicalstatus. And it’s this physicality that felt to me the most queerly empowering: my body hasnever been so unruly, so leaky, so fluid and irrational, emotional and non-understandable(non-penetrable). I find it deeply saddening that patriarchy and capitalism have turnedpregnancy and parenting into something to be feared and bought into every step of theway. This should be the most potent force, the ultimate fuck you patriarchy I am life. Yetinstead pregnant women and mothers are belittled and herded into sanitised andconformist corners of identity & existence.He is not my husband, boyfriend, partner or lover. He is he and I am I and together we arenot one, not a family, not a unit. Sometimes when we sleep at night I think of us as a pack ofanimals, but that’s as together as we get. We learn from such a young age that it is not niceor good to put people into categories; people don’t live well in boxes. But in the home wecontinue to confine individuals to (gendered and aged) roles such as mother, father, child,sister, brother. If we could rid ourselves of these titles, their expectations and boundarieswe could all roam domestic geographies and subsequently our lives, more freely andhappily.4Bean4An excerpt from ‘To Destroy Capitalism We Must Destroy The Family’, available at Bean’s troy-capitalism-we-must-destroy-the-family

13Clare QualmannPerambulator (2014)Baby Slow Marathon, 2014. Huntly, Aberdeenshire. Photo by Clare Qualmann.Clare Qualmann is an artist/researcher with an interdisciplinary performance orientedpractice. Her work engages a range of participatory methods, and a breadth of media toexplore and reveal the overlooked - the politics and potentials of everyday life. She works atthe University of East London and The Cass where her teaching and research connectsstrongly to walking art practice, working on modules that forefront interdisciplinarity,participation and site specificity. A founder member of the Walking Artists Network, Clarecontinues to facilitate its occasional events and active online presence. Projects includewalkwalkwalk: stories from the Bethnal Green archive (2010) a permanent installation inBethnal Green Old Town Hall, Perambulator (2014) a participatory performance/walkingproject (with prams) for Deveron Arts in Huntly (Aberdeenshire), East End Jam (2015) acollaborative walking, foraging and jam-making project for the London Legacy DevelopmentCorporation, and WALKING WOMEN (2016) at Somerset House and Forest Fringe incollaboration with Amy Sharrocks.www.clarequalmann.co.uk/

14BordersOn Borders and PerambulatorIn 2012, when my son was a few months old, I was invited to make a walk for a project atLewisham Art House. Initially I ruled this out. My practice before would have requiredmultiple research trips, extensive walking in the area. This now felt entirelyunfeasible. Instead of saying no I decided to try to make a piece that would be possible todo with my baby in tow.Barriers. Boundaries. Edges. Limits.In the first months of his life, pushing his pram around the area that I had lived in for years, Iwas struck by the number of detours that I had to take: the route alterations, theimpediments to smooth passage. My very familiar routes through and to places were rudelydisrupted, forcing a new relationship with the physical details of the urban environment.Where you have to stop. Past which you cannot move or progress.A new radar evolves – seeking out the dropped kerbs and the ramps – avoiding steps,narrow gaps, awkward turns: going the long way round becomes the norm. Viewing the citythrough this new lens feels political. Losing the freedom of easy mobility – a freedom that Ihadn’t been aware of before – connects me to a massive group of people (predominantlywomen) in the same position, encumbered by wheels.Mold. Immobilize. Reduce.5This became the premise for Perambulator - making visible these issues through a masswalking with prams. Following the first Perambulator walk in Lewisham I went on to make amore extensive version of the project in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, exploring the pram walkingcultures of the town in a month-long residency as part of Deveron Arts ‘Walking Institute’(2014). Walking in a small town highlighted the borders and boundaries far more thanwalking in the city. The project became about finding them, testing them, crossing them,and taking others with me.Thus far and no further.Clare Qualmann5Marilyn Frye The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Crossing Press, 1983) p. 2.

15Elena MarchevskaValid until (2009 – 2011)Day 106, Valid until , 2009-2011 video and performance. Photo by Elena Marchevska.Elena Marchevska is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Following her doctoral studyon screen and feminist performance practice, she continued to focus on the relationshipsbetween performance, maternal body and digital writing. She was a key organizer of theinternational conference ‘Motherhood and Creative Practice’ at London South BankUniversity in 2015, and writes about the intersections between maternal, creativity andactivism. She is currently working on research about radical self-organised performancepractices (focusing predominately on South East Europe) and their urban manifestation. Sheis a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Performance at London South Bank University andGraduate Advisor for Transart Institute, Berlin.www.elenamarcevska.com/

16TimeDiary entry, Day 91Living between two worlds can be demanding. Like an illness, you can’t escape from it. It isso deep in your body. It covers every border that protects you from outside. You canarticulate yourself on the screen, but deep inside you know that the screen neverarticulates, it only imposes form.Delivery at gate.There are two gates. One in. One out. And me in between.A: “We miss you so much”. Her eyes get tearful.I can’t deliver the news.B: “Maybe we will stay.”A: “Stay where?”B: “I am not quite sure .”How do you deliver a loss?My project Valid until (2009-2011) is an in-depth research on the theme of borders andmotherhood. It consisted of a series of autobiographical writing, performative photographsand videos taken during a period of 140 days. The period was symbolic, equal to onehundred and forty questions that I had to answer about myself, my children and my familyin the visa application. This is a challenge that repeatedly occurs in my life. Coming fromSouth East Europe (the ex-Yugoslavia region), my validity and legal status is constantly reevaluated and subject to the scrutiny of the Western European authorities. The period ofone hundred and forty days was a period of confirming the validity of my legal status in theUnited Kingdom. Borders can be built from outside, they can be physical and tangible,difficult to cross, but passable. I felt compelled as an artist to talk about the experience ofmotherhood as a highly political state, where the body is split and carries not only the childinto this world, but also cultural responsibility and an intergenerational take on the bordersthat youngsters have to cross. In my research and performative interventions, I looked atthe ways in which artist-mothers negotiate and translate their experiences with/on theborder.Elena Marchevska

17Emily Underwood-LeePatience (2009)Still from Patience, 2009. Photo by Emily Underwood-Lee.Emily Underwood-Lee is a failing feminist mother to two daughters. She is also aperformance practitioner and Research Fellow at the George Ewart Evans Centre forStorytelling at the University of South Wales. Emily creates autobiographical work and isprincipally concerned with the construction of gender and how the body can be presentedand represented in performance. Her research focuses on autobiographical stories and thebody in a variety of contexts including feminist performance art, narratives of illness,performance and the maternal, and performance and disability. Emily’s solo projectsinclude Titillation (2014), Titillation Grade 3 (2011), Patience (2009), and Ode to MortenHarket (2007).www.emilyunderwoodlee.wordpress.com

18GriefGrief is an instance where the mind is unable to contain and control itself or maintainrational reasoning. The fallacy that our bodies are under the control of our minds is broughtto the fore. The confusion of the emotional and physical sensations of grief, the flowing oftears, the involuntary rage and depression, all serve to illustrate the lack of control we haveover both our physical bodies and our emotional selves. Grief also breaks down our abilityto contain ourselves within the Symbolic.6 Grief not only destroys the Symbolic; it alsoliterally renders us outside language. It can leave us without words, or grief-stricken. We arestruck dumb by the power of our emotions; the mind and the body are united in theirinability to psychically or physically contain our grief. Patience is my attempt to find a way toperform the experience of grief which was such a profound part of my own journey tomotherhood.When I was 18 weeks pregnant I was diagnosed with a grade 3 invasive ductal carcinoma ofthe breast. I had a lumpectomy while I was pregnant. My baby was delivered 8 weeks earlyby caesarean section and spent a fortnig

This Study Room Guide on Live Art and Motherhood features fourteen individual artists and two artist collectives working in the mediums of Live Art and performance around the topic of the maternal. Motherhood and the maternal are difficult terms. There is an inherent essentialism and biology is often assumed. For us, motherhood refers to the lived