Macarena Rojas Osterling

THE MOTHER DRAWINGS are a yearly cycle based series of work that respond to the idea of being a mother and an artist. In a male driven world and profession, the #motherartist not only has to face her condition as a woman living in a patriarchal system but also her condition as a mother. As #motherartists women struggle to keep work as they cope with the demands of a young child. Despite the subject sounding as a repeated pseudo-feminist-artworld-cliché, an artist must go through the process of motherhood to understand the immense challenge it represents to the art practice.

In this performative gesture of drawing while coping with maternity, I treat my drawings as children: I take my drawings everywhere, just as a mother is aware of her child everyday. The drawings represent a failed attempt into making a drawing, just as motherhood is a failed attempt into motherhood itself. The drawings live with me, they serve me as shower sponges, as kitchen towels, as bibs, as place mats, as impermanent decorative objects, as floor mats, as umbrellas, as napkins, as notebooks, as a canvas for my child, etc.  They inhabit my domestic space and they get lost inside my purse in the middle of baby wipes and pacifiers. My brain shifts back and forth from the concrete to the abstract in a matter of seconds. Both my child and the drawings act as parasites to my body; one for the love, the others for the obsession to pursuit an art practice.  As a nomadic mother, these drawings have crossed the Atlantic several times during the past year in which I have been commuting between cities with my child.

Most of the drawings act as containers to the own criticism I hold against myself as a mother, a woman and an artist. They have also embraced compelling reads on other mothers and feminists such as Alice Walker, Maggie Nelson, Susan Sontag, Rebecca Solnit, Virginia Woolf, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Lessing, Mary Kelly, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin.