AMANDA DALLA VILLA ADAMS
MARCH 6, 2019
REGION > RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

Multidisciplinary artist Sarah Irvin makes art about her experience as a mother; from her changing body during pregnancy and the trauma of labor to the monotony of breastfeeding or the challenging sleep habits of an infant. Through videos, books, drawings, sculptures, and installations, Irvin privileges her own biography as a lens for exploring the role of caring for another person and how that relates to identity and trauma. Yet, while Irvin highlights her personal experience as a woman, the work fluidly moves outside a biographical or gendered realm to addresses the socio-political and economic dimensions of mothering as a verb and underappreciated labor in contemporary society.

Irvin and I met through our day jobs: she was then-director for Current art fair and I interviewed her for an article that was published in Richmond, Virginia’s alt-weekly newspaper. I later became familiar with her work through her website and wanted to see more in person, so we scheduled a studio visit to view the work she presented recently in a two-person exhibition, titled The Beginning and the End, at Massey Klein in New York.

Amanda Dalla Villa Adams: I’m hoping my kids stay asleep for this interview.

Sarah Irvin: That’s how I’ve operated for the past four years, so I get you.

(both laugh together)

ADVA: Your work deals with family and biography: your grandfather’s memory loss in the Ink Series (2013-2019) and your daughter’s development in everything else since 2014. How did this shift towards a personal approach happen in your practice?

SI: The desire to create work about my experience as a mother was a factor in my desire to have a child in the first place. I had made the assumption that the caretaking responsibilities were an impediment to artmaking. But the definitions of artistic practice are constantly in flux. I asked myself what type of practice could only exist if the person was a mother?  Once I traveled down that path conceptually, I started to be able to reconcile some of my hesitations. I rethought what a creative practice could be and that opened up a new space for thinking about myself in that role.

ADVA: Do you think it’s a generational shift? I’ve spoken with several female artists in their 50s and 60s who have told me they purposively decided not to have children because that would interfere with their artistic practice.

SI: I think that we’re seeing big differences generationally. And yes, it isn’t hard to find artists who were hiding the fact that they had children because it would damage their careers. There is Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973-79), but that is definitely one of very few outliers. While it’s much less of a problem for our generation and the art community frequently vocalizes support for mother artists, there are still extreme barriers.

ADVA: What is one of those extreme things that has come up in your life?

SI: The cost of childcare. The cost of being able to have space to work or maintain a studio practice.  A recent study found that 75% of US artists earn less than $10,000 a year from their art practice. Considering the average cost of childcare, most artists can barely cover that cost through their work, much less the basic cost of maintaining a studio space.

ADVA: Since your work is about motherhood and your relationship to your child, have you ever thought about how your child might respond to your work as she grows up?

SI: I considered that from the start. She has a right to privacy and she’s not old enough to grant consent to public portrayal of certain aspects of her life. I made the commitment to avoid anything about her personality, identifying actions, or defining characteristics. I tried to keep her future opinions in mind as I made decisions about the work. I play it pretty safe regarding her privacy because that is what I am most comfortable with.

ADVA: Can you think of anything that your relationship might encounter—as she gets older, enters puberty, becomes an adult—that will be off limits for your practice or do you foresee moving your practice into a different space? 

SI: I have more aspects of mothering to experience since I’m responding to another person who is constantly changing, so there is more to come in the work.  As she starts to form opinions about it, I’ll take them into account. I do assume there will be the normal, healthy amount of rebellion against me and against my work. It will be a give and a take. We’ll have to work it out together. 

ADVA: I find it interesting that you’re exploring a mother/daughter relationship but that isn’t clear in the work, which seems to be ungendered.

SI: For now, her gender isn’t really playing a factor in my parenting, and I’m not consciously treating her differently based on her biology. As she gets older and starts to navigate gender and her identity, I will be there to support her. Her opinions will definitely be a factor if that were to show up in my practice in a public way.

ADVA: In your work, you use the repetition of domestic tasks—breastfeeding, formula feeding, or rocking—to create art that has a minimalist appearance: monochromatic color palette, line drawings, and seriality. Can you talk about this dichotomy? You’ve taken these tasks, that some might call sentimental, and presented it as raw data?

SI: Work about mothering and caretaking is routinely dismissed as pure sentiment. I’m hoping to challenge these assumptions, and thankfully I’m one of many artists working to shift the narrative. We need to create space to consider caretaking responsibilities as multifaceted, and to normalize the experience of a caretaker facing many conflicting emotions. There are quite a few paintings of women breastfeeding and of women taking care of their children from the point of view of an outside observer. They’re not typically from the point of view of the caretaker as the speaking subject of that artwork. First person accounts of these experiences can provide a more nuanced understanding of the experience. Specifically, in the Rocking Chair Drawings, I found presenting the repetitive tasks within the formal seriality you mentioned, a way to represent the experience of time within caretaking as simultaneously both cyclical and linear.

ADVA: Do you think that one reason this caregiving is misunderstood is because it isn’t typically seen? Often, rocking or nursing a child is done inside someone’s home, a private space, rather than in public.

SI: Yes. What’s interesting is that it happened to everyone: every adult was cared for as a child, but for the most part it’s a forgotten part of everyone’s life. That was a motivating factor for creating the Infant Feeding Log (2018). I documented every time I breastfed my daughter with an app on my phone and converted that information into a six-foot-long book. Even I had no concept of how much work I had done until I finally opened up the file with data to start making the book. I was shocked that there were 2400 entries.

ADVA: What does it mean to you to “mother” a child? 

SI: I think of Sara Ruddick who wrote, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (1995), about the words we use when we talk about mothers. She described “to mother”— the verb—as a discipline and a practice, and highlighted that it is something that is very different from pregnancy and childbirth. Its typical use is to describe acts of care that are not actually not related to biological sex. Many people are trying to navigate how to structure care within an equal partnership. But we run into things like zero days of leave for the partner that did not give birth. It highlights the reality that a parent’s life is greatly affected by factors that are very much out of their control. Right now, I don’t see a difference in my mothering actions and the actions of my spouse, but most people wouldn’t call him a mother. There is a failure within our current available vocabulary and its ability to describe the reality of our experiences.

ADVA: Much of being a mom seems to be about choices that are used to create division amongst women: epidural or natural birth; to nurse or bottle feed; cloth or disposable diapers; homeschool or public school; or helicopter parenting or free-range parenting. How does this division inform your practice? 

SI: The clearest picture of that division is in the work about early infant feeding. Most people don’t fit neatly into the boxes outlined by these debates. I didn’t. I made paintings with formula and made drawings while breastfeeding because I did both, and I hope those works facilitate a more complex starting point for those discussions. Ultimately, everyone should be able to make the informed decisions that work best for themselves and their child without judgement. An individual’s decisions surrounding parenting are influenced by a multitude of factors that vary from person to person, and we need to acknowledge that.

ADVA: Your work takes place at the site of female bodies: yours and your daughters. And your work values reproduction and its effects on the woman’s body, which is often considered a taboo topic. How does this inform your work?

SI: I was told by a visiting artist in grad school that I didn’t have to tell anyone about the source of mark-making in the Rocking Chair Drawings (2014). This is the only time I’ve heard someone suggest to an artist that they hide the subject matter of their work.  I didn’t take his advice. In the Measurement Project (2014-2015), I measured my stomach every day of pregnancy with a piece of yarn, tied it off, and displayed the accumulation.  It was a record of a changing body over time, but it does not directly depict a body. I hope some of my work provides an entry point for some, like that artist, who struggles with the bias. The reality though, is that many of the works also involve male bodies, for instance, many men participating in creating the Rocking Chair Drawings, because many men were involved in the activity of rocking.

ADVA: Is that one of the reasons that you haven’t used blood or bodily fluids in your work? Your Contractions and Heartbeats (2014-2018) is a beautiful little book of line drawings about labor, a bloody and sometimes violent experience.

SI: The Contraction and Heartbeat books are taken straight from the hospital trash can. My contractions and heartbeats were monitored for about 17 hours of labor after I showed signs of an infection, and the hospital equipment produces these great little readymade accordion books with the data. I made that piece in collaboration with my daughter, bacteria, and the hospital. I think of my work as one facet of a greater artistic discourse about the experience, which involves many artists who engage directly with blood and bodily fluids. For my own practice, for now, I’ve focused on some other aspects of the experience. I didn’t intentionally rule out tackling bodily fluids in my work, but I do enjoy the fact that I have found a way to make work about the experience with a different entry point, circumventing the taboo for now.

ADVA: There is a trauma in Contractions and Heartbeats (2014-2018): it registers that your contractions kept going. For someone that knows what labor entails, they would understand that this was traumatic. There’s also the trauma of the loss of identity when you take on the identity of a parent and caring for another person. How does your work relate to the trauma associated with pregnancy, the physical trauma of labor and delivery, or the loss of identity? 

SI:  I approached trauma and loss broadly and more abstractly in a video piece, A Bringing Forth (2015). I intend to pursue these topics in my work more directly, but it’s difficult. The experience of trauma comes with its own taboo. For instance, I was screened for gestational diabetes. They draw your blood, you drink a horrible liquid, you feel terrible while sitting in a lobby for an hour, and then they take your blood again.  But rates for postpartum depression are higher than rates of gestational diabetes, and I wasn’t even given the three-minute questionnaire that screens for depression. The taboo extends even to medical care, so it’s going to take me some time to navigate it personally and in my practice.

ADVA: It’s ironic that leading up to pregnancy, a woman eventually visits the doctor weekly but during postpartum care, you have one visit six-weeks later.

SI: Yes. I went in at six weeks and they asked, are you still in any pain? I said yes, and they did not have any follow up questions. Trauma, loss of identity, and mental health surrounding childbirth and childcare are all subjects I am interested in tackling more overtly. It’s a vulnerable position to be in, but the disconnects within our approach to this as a society, culturally and medically, are compelling me to look for a way to enter into the dialogue more directly.

ADVA: It seems to be part of what the culture places on mothers: the expectation to get on with your life. After my second child, I had a late postpartum hemorrhage and with my third child, I was terrified about my postpartum care because of the trauma of my earlier experience. But I felt that the culture was telling me that I needed to hurry and bounce back.

SI: Right, and you probably pushed yourself to fulfill that expectation.  I’m sorry you faced that pressure. Significant change in the way we think about and care for people in these scenarios needs to happen.

ADVA: What are you working on now?

SI: I have several series that I would like to make, still focusing on my experience as a mother.  I’ll be using media that I haven’t used and asking questions I haven’t asked. In March, I travel to London to be part of a symposium put on by Procreate project in London. It’s an interdisciplinary conference with the art and medical community coming together to focus on the issues related to mothers.

Sarah Irvin earned an Master of Fine of Arts in painting from George Mason University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting and drawing from the University of Georgia. Irvin has been featured in more than twenty solo shows, as well as more than fifty group exhibitions, across the United States and abroad. Irvin’s work is included in the prestigious corporate collections of Capital One, Four Seasons Hotel, Federal Reserve Bank, and Royal Caribbean, as well as the private collections of Quirk Hotel, Try-Me Urban Restoration Project, and the University of Richmond. She is the founder of the Artist Parent Index, a searchable database of artists making work about their experience with reproduction and caring for their children. Irvin is represented by Page Bond Gallery in Richmond, VA; and Kathryn Markel Fine Arts and Massey Klein Gallery, both in New York City. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

sarahirvinart.com

Amanda Dalla Villa Adams is an independent curator, art writer, educator, and historian based in Richmond, Virginia.​ Adams earned her BFA in sculpture and extended media from Virginia Commonwealth University, an MA in art history and certificate in museum studies from the University of Cincinnati (UC), and is ABD in art history from VCU. She has presented her research domestically and internationally, including the Rothermere Institute at Oxford University and McGill University, and chaired panels at the annual Mid-America College Art Association and Southeastern College Art conferences. In addition to contributing art criticism for national publications, including Artforum, Hyperallergic, and Sculpture magazine, Adams is an art critic for the alternative-weekly newspaper Style Weekly. Her academic research has appeared in the peer-reviewed Art Inquiries and Archives of American Art and the graduate-journal Montage. Finally, Adams has curated exhibitions of the work of Hoss Haley (2015), Emily Erb (2016), and Carli Holcomb (2017) and taught at the College of William and Mary, VCU, and Virginia State University.

amandadallavillaadams.weebly.com

All images courtesy the artist.

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