The partly present mother

Abstract

This paper makes critical reflections on a performance titled The Partly Present Mother, which traced acts of nurturing and loss at the Kosar Contemporary Gallery, Bristol, in 2019. The research reflects upon the silence of pregnancy without birth or ‘miscarriage’ as a Matrixial space, where the union of both mother and other are in flux. This changeableness or uncertainty embedded within the maternal is critiqued by making parallels between the becomings of drawing and mothering by positioning them both as verbs or acts. Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind and the Greek myth of Pliny’s shadow are used to consider loss as interwoven within drawing practice, where the corporeality of drawings practices wavers amidst discovery and loss. The project takes these experiences of loss answering Cixous et al.’s call to ‘write the body’, performing them through touch and repositioning textuality as live and physical. The parallels of becoming imbedded in the acts of drawing and mothering look to Elena notional of the maternal as a verb and the process of becoming subjectivity as embedded within drawing (; ; ; )to reclaim the flux of the maternal notwithstanding pregnancy without birth.