Presentation at Interventions: Reflections, Critiques, Practices - Australian Women's and Gender Studies Biennial Conference 20

On Friday I gave my research paper at the Australian Women's and Gender Studies Biennial Conference 2102. The conference theme,  Interventions: Reflections, Critiques, Practices, inspired a paper on the women's at movement and its most recent manifestations in the mother's art movement; in the event the paper deviated into giving an account of how in the process of researching the women's art movement and contemporary women artists, moving into researching the mother in art, that I moved from art journalism and writing about other women artists to writing about my own experiences and hidden histories in my family background, the cultural history of colonialism in Australia, which has become my main research focus.

Ruth Skilbeck (University of New South Wales)

From WAM to MAM: Feminist Mothers’ Creative and Political Interventions in Contemporary Art and Arts Journalism

The 1970s Women’s Art Movement became a key driver of social and cultural change as women mobilised internationally demanding the right to participate in cultural life and in the art world, not, as in the disciplinary patriarchal traditions of art history, in supporting roles: objects of desire, models and wives; but as subjects, and artists in their own right. However, in the bid for equality many second wave feminists denounced motherhood as collusion with the patriarchy, evidence of ‘sleeping with the enemy’; they renounced motherhood on political grounds. This paper reflectively explores the proposition that women who created lasting social and political change by seeking to do motherhood differently made more radical and complex interventions—as feminist artists and writers and mothers. Over the past five years, there have been numerous survey exhibitions that reflect on the impacts of 1970s women’s art movement and feminism on contemporary art movements and art practice by women now; alongside and intersecting with ‘queer studies’ a new inclusive international ‘Mother Art Movement’ has emerged in third wave feminism. In this historical and present-day context, the author reflects on her experience of media intervention—as feminist, mother, and arts journalist- by starting up an international arts writing media business, Art Features International, a platform from which she continues to interview and publish media stories, and scholarly articles, on prominent international contemporary artists, including Mary Kelly ‘founding mother’ of the 1970s international women’s art movement, Tracey Emin, and ‘Aboriginal urban’ Australian women artists, Tracey Moffat, Fiona Foley, and Bianca Beetson. This paper reflects on the author’s practice as a feminist arts journalist and scholar, and discusses key issues of interventions by ‘feminist-and-mother’ artists and arts writers in Australia, and internationally.

Dr Ruth Skilbeck is a widely published arts journalist, media producer and arts journalism scholar. She is a Lecturer on the MA in Journalism and Communication at the Journalism and Media Research Centre, in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, at the University of New South Wales.