Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood

Exploring maternity through the work of artists from prehistory to the present day, Acts of Creation addresses the abiding mother-shaped hole in art history. While the Madonna and Child is one of the greatest subjects of European art, we rarely see art about motherhood as a lived experience. Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood addresses this blind spot in art history, asserting the artist mother as an important – if rarely visible – cultural figure.

Based on a major Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition, Acts of Creation explores motherhood as a creative enterprise, albeit one at times tempered by ambivalence, exhaustion or grief. Featuring the work of more than sixty modern and contemporary artists, the book approaches motherhood as both state and subject, exploring the lived experience of maternity throughout history. This exploration of the mother across time and culture travels from the goddess artefacts of various traditions, through the politicisation of childbearing in nationalist propaganda, to the pop-culture reimagining of the pregnant body and the ongoing struggle for reproductive rights.