Motherhood, as experienced by women, has been an undervalued subiect in western art and it continues to be a contentious and precarious topic and position to navigate in the commercial and professional art arenas. How can something so essential to human existence be sidestepped and disregarded?

Milk Tongue challenges familiar archetypes of motherhood through artworks created by women who have given birth and practiced or are practicing mothering -the messy, painful, embarrassing, and sometimes humorous experiences of bringing new life into the world. The artists in this exhibition use motherhood as a lens to examine historical and contemporary social issues (reproductive rights, capitalism, racism, freedom) and expand our understanding of the term "motherhood."

Curated by Ashley Cooper and Carrie Mae Smith

A Silky, Squishy Oil Filled Room of Her Own

by Kirstin Lamb

Imaging the studio is engaging in a conversation about creativity.  Paintings of the studio are ciphers for an artist’s opinions about the creative act.  One artist images an expansive, expensive room filled with tools, another a simple space, outdoors. 

Suzanne Schireson’s spaces are imaged partly outdoors in sheds or outbuildings, simply and at dusk.  She revels in their wildness and the diminutive “she-shed” she paints becomes the broader silky, squishy oil filled room of her own, opening out upon suburban and rural expanses of green-lit, peach-lit, spot-lit wonder. 

Schireson is letting something out in these light, paper thin poetic short stories.  Having read and loved the stories of Carson McCullers, I feel a kind of kinship with these tales here.  Some of the women featured laboring in the computer’s glow or slatted hazy light of evening feel like they could run away, dance naked in the rain in the street, inhabit pages of The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.  Each pose and move, each activity considered, private, and thought through, both showing and telling in the space of a paper.

What makes for poesy and narrative in a painting about the fact and space creativity?  Leaving much to the brush.  The electric yellow and purple mush that stands in for sun or grass or walls allows us to break in with our own specifics.  She doesn’t describe everything, she allows for ambiguity and awkwardness as a kind of feature of the brushwork.  And this isn’t because of faltering skill or a simple love of awkwardness, I believe the small paper, combined with the quickness and speed of the story she wanted to tell about each artist in her space created a kind of urgency akin to the making of plein air painting.  She worked in studio as if she was painting the landscape on site, wild with color and energy, not reigning in her impulses, not using her considerable restraint and measured skill shown in other parts of the larger body of her work.  These are fast, bright, a bit wonky, and sometimes longing, private looks into someone’s space or dream.

A woman’s studio should be a place of wildness, but it is also a respite from the tasks and duties of her gender.  Schireson in her own statement mentions the dusky witching hour as time away from motherhood, from work, to make creativity in the glow.  These images have a sense of abandon, all the tasks she mentions needing to avoid are absent from the spaces, no crying children, no laundry, no car, no unaccounted for emotional labor.

The figures she paints are nominally female in the usual ways, slight lumpen breasts, an updo, ponytail or elaborate hairstyle, or well-chosen poses and clothing.  Otherwise the figures have this pleasant chunky genderless-ness, as if it didn’t quite matter that she is female. I feel immediately comfortable with each figure, at home, and allied with each person on her creative journey.  That her gender is not necessarily available or needed for the audience to engage with her work and person makes the experience that much richer, she appears as an actor not a figure for delectation or contemplation herself.

Everyone longs for a place to get away.  Perhaps now more than ever a cabin or rustic shed in a wooded place feels needed, a place to remove oneself from other people, duties and threat.  That the getaway that is imaged is a creative labor, allows each place to radiate with a kind of otherworldly glow, as if to say escape and respite are ethereal and generative in creative work. 

The work that most struck me upon visiting Suzanne’s studio was her “Dream Studio”, an airy incomplete out building, the structure of the building mirroring the incomplete vision of the idea of the place. Suzanne leaves a landscape painting in process on the floor, as if she has already started inhabiting this unfinished structure, built only in her dreams.  She starts early.  And why not, I think the dream of painting and art-making is making a space for oneself, and the space is as mental as it is physical. This ideal cabin, this incomplete space, feels to me a devotional love letter to the studio and never being complete in the search for one’s work.  Schireson’s work is not just a documentation or story about another artist, it is a dream for herself and her viewer.

Suzanne Schireson works in a centuries old tradition of paintings of the studio, but also a contemporary tradition of visiting the studios of artists she admires and imaging them.  Though one can look to images of the studio or making space in Rembrandt, Courbet, Velasquez, and Matisse, one is looking at artists of the past primarily imaging their own working spaces.  Contemporary artists like Joe Fig and Maria Calendra (Pencil in the Studio), are working in a newer tradition of artists visiting and imaging the work of peers or icons and then sculpting, painting or drawing the work in the situation in which it is made.  Contemporary making seems filled with interviews and re-imaging of fellow artists, in many ways a kind of loving chain of influence and community. 

Schireson has chosen fellow makers from her circle, all women, who occupy studio spaces in the between space between indoor and outdoor, home, garden and forested space, domestic and professional. 

The traveling studio and work of Canadian photographer Karen Stentaford rendered with loving oddity in “K’s Secret Darkroom,” is a pop-up ice fishing tent devised for developing tintypes.  Schireson describes the weirdness of the space with the dark color and glowing edges of pink and orange (inside) and green (the ice on the outside).  She mirrors the important formal relationship of the tent to the camera with repeated echoing compositional triangles and radiating spikes of the camera’s legs.  Yet, it is the warmth and knowledge of the space, her personal relationship to the photographer, having been a subject of her work and spent time in and near the tent, that allows the mystery of the tent itself to unravel in the warmth of the glow inside.  Schireson twins an image of the peer artist, familiar confidant or friend with the mystery of the creative in action.

The welding space of Stacy Latt Savage, a colleague of Schireson’s at UMass, is similarly otherworldly in its glow and yet somehow warm and inviting.  The figure of Savage is large in the space, standing strong and tall, as she adjusts to work from home.  Something about Schireson’s rendering of Savage as a strong and stable giant in her shed, dwarfing her space and mastering it is comforting and inspiring, bathed in the light of the ground’s late-day clementine sky.  The largeness of Stacy’s figure hints at the kind of dreaming and industry we expect comes from her space, and it as if she can’t hold in the ideas and labor inside herself so she is growing to fit exactly to the space.  There is an extra joy in the meandering, playful mopping of the line of the hose outside the garage/shed, that mirrors the line of the welder, suggesting the line-work she makes, the line of the brush, the play of imagination at work.

Suzanne Schireson threads storytelling, plein air painting and love of documenting her community together into a glowing ode to a much discussed room of her own or “she-shed.”  That she does so with bright new color and strange characters makes for a wily and joyful ride.

-Kirstin Lamb is an artist and curator based in Providence, RI