MAM: Maternal Art Magazine, Issue One: "Stay At Home"
Announcing ‘MAM': Maternal Art Magazine’, Issue One: "Stay At Home"
MAM Issue One, ‘Stay At Home’, Cover image by Dawn Yow, ‘Little Hands‘ (2019).
MAM, Maternal Art Magazine is a new art magazine focusing on artists from around the world producing work about the maternal. The first issue, Stay At Home due out in June 2020 is a response by 20 artists to their experiences of working at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The magazine aims to support artists through this challenging time as well as raising money for Women’s Aid. Stay At Home has been edited by Helen Sargeant, an artist and academic based in Todmorden, Yorkshire, UK.
MAM has been carefully curated to reflect a diverse range of responses and experiences by both established and emerging artists. Contributions include embroidered photographs by Jessa Fairbrother, paintings by Shani Rhys James and Jessica Timmis, collage work by Lauren McLaughlin, an interview with Paula Chambers who makes installations and sculptures about disrupted domesticity, a series of self-portraits, PRONIA by performance artist Nicola Hunter, Knitted Houses of Crime by Freddie Robins and exquisite paper-cuttings of matriarchs by Pippa Dyriaga. In photographs by Dawn Yow we see her children captured as lone figures entranced and lost within the emptiness of the landscape that surrounds them. There is an interview with Helen Knowles founder of the Birth Rites Collection, meticulously staged domestic photographs by Sian Bonnell and emotionally charged responses; such as Laura Godfrey Isaacs powerful diary drawings about her mastectomy. Penny Davis’ drawings depicting her intense experiences of solo parenting and Barbara Philipp visual journal intimately portraying the feelings of confinement, loss of physical connection and grief felt after the death of her father. Amy Dignam has contributed colourful and playful drawings made in the bath, her place of solitude during lockdown and Rachel Fallon explores ideas of reverse parenting and care for her elderly parents. Megan Wynne’s photographs are a riot of fun and see her reenacting birth with her children as willing collaborators. Lena Simic takes a walk in her local park in Everton and reflects upon feelings of sadness, loneliness, and climate change and wonders what the future may hold for her, her family and the planet.
"‘Stay At Home’ is a response to the pandemic, the interruption, and anxiety that each day we are all having to live with. MAM was born initially as a way to distract me from looking too often at the news and becoming depressed, a way to be creative, collaborate, communicate and engage with other artists and mothers during this crisis. MAM’s wish is that this first issue of the magazine will provide its readers with a small moment of joyduring this international crisis. MAM: Stay At Home, has been produced at the kitchen table in-between the on-going drama of daily family life, the caring and coaxing of children to do their schoolwork, the cuddling of cats, cooking, clearing up and feeding the washing machine with yet more laundry.”
- Helen Sargeant, Creative Director at Maternal Art and Editor of Maternal Art Magazine
List of all contributors: Sian Bonnell, Paula Chambers, Penny Davis, Amy Dignam, Pippa Dyriaga, Jessa Fairbrother, Rachel Fallon, Jodie Hawkes, Nicola Hunter, Laura Godfrey Isaacs, Shani Rhys James, Paula McCloskey, Lauren McLaughlin, Martina Mullaney, Barbara Philipp, Freddie Robins, Lena Simic, Jessica Timmis, Megan Wynne, Dawn Yow.
To order: The Maternal Art project website.