Akers, C., Lee, S., Watson, Z., Hemmersbach, L., Blaszkzok, S., Steeper, L., 2025.

LULL at The Birley

LULL is a collective of artist mothers responding to the lived experience of motherhood and the challenge of sustaining an art practice while raising young children.

This exhibition explores the intersection of caregiving and creativity, embracing interruptions and acknowledging the tension between limitation and possibility. Through a commitment to the unfinished, each artist has found unique ways to create during the "lulls" between daily caregiving responsibilities. Time and space are central to the work; time to imagine, space to lay down paper or print, time to finish a thought or a conversation.

Through LULL, we aim to ignite a dialogue by exploring the advantages of motherhood for artists. We seek to affirm the artist mother as a vital cultural figure and create a space where mothering, caring, and nurturing are recognised as the complex, multidimensional experiences they truly are. Where women are in direct, daily contact with 'life, death, beauty, growth, and corruption...' [1] universal themes which profoundly shape and enrich the work of the artist mother.

The interruptions from our children are just one aspect of the landscape in which artist mothers navigate. The space and the time that we permit ourselves is another. The burden of guilt that a mother bears is deeply embedded through cultural norms about the role of the ever giving, ever patient, ever abundant mother.

By tending to our creative work, are we also tending to ourselves? Can making visible the work of artist mothers help us re-imagine the cultural narrative surrounding motherhood?

In engaging with this conversation, we tread carefully, recognising that the challenges mothers face in sustaining a creative practice are shaped by intersectionality. Some mothers have larger support networks, reliable childcare, or fewer financial burdens, while others contend with additional barriers such as invisible disabilities, single parenthood, or elder care responsibilities. Black and Asian mothers in particular, are disproportionately affected by these challenges.

There is no singular definition of what an artist mother can, should, or will 'achieve'. The pace of making might be slow and steady, come in fits and starts, or be interrupted by years away from practice. In LULL, we advocate for the artist mother as a cultural figure with an important story to tell.

[Ursula K. Le Guin, The Fisherwoman's Daughter, 1988]