This is Essential Work Exhibition

From our mother/artist open call, we received over 700 pieces of art from around the world. The volume of work was both moving and invigorating. The artists you see on the following pages bring global perspectives from ethnically and geographically diverse backgrounds. We have early-stage artists to mid-career makers. 

Is it possible to create networks of mother artists and activists to support and encourage one another to continue the necessary work of forging change? From what we have learned from this process, a resounding “Yes, we believe so.”

In our inaugural This is Essential Work exhibition, our artists come from Brazil, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, (London via) China, (New York via) New Delhi, Nigeria, and more. We have had the privilege to see unique art questioning familiar social constructs and barriers, topics that are common discourse in our academic circles. Our selection of the work was guided in the first instance by how individual pieces spoke to the issue of how social reproductive work is valued in society and to the lived experience of performing this labour. It was important to us to select work that drew out different historical experiences across class, cultures, and geographical space and time. We wanted the work to be intersectional, and we wanted to showcase work by artists at different career stages. The artists’ own words in describing their experiences and practice were also taken into account in our selection. 

We were excited to see artwork grounded in the physical aspects of maternal labour, in and through bodies. The art shows multiple forms of social reproductive work: conceiving, feeding, clothing, cleaning, teaching, and entertaining. We see how the act of play is an effective tool in the ways that mothers impart knowledge to children. Too often this maternal labour is overlooked by society at large. The fatigue and the sacrifices of the work of social reproduction moulds the next generation. Many of the works show us the embodied nature of mothering, the physicality of this labour, and its transformative effects on the bodies of workers is manifest and inescapable. All this at a time when some states are removing women’s autonomy over their reproductive bodies through legislation. This artwork is a political act.

Please explore our exhibiting artist’s work, their websites and social media. They can be contacted directly for additional inquires and purchases.

Summer 2022

How much is the work of social reproduction valued in our world? Nurturing, feeding, bearing, and caring work is crucial to the survival of humans everywhere, yet the world rarely perceives it as work.

This Is Essential Work is an online open-access intersectional feminist exhibition initiated by academic mothers and creators, Michal Nahman (UWE, Bristol) and Susan Newman (Open University) in response to their experiences and interdisciplinary research on the commodification of breastmilk and forms of exploitation of women’s bodies and labour.

This exhibition emerged from research funded by a UWE Vice Chancellor’s Award for Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research conducted just before the Covid-19 pandemic, in Bengaluru, India, into mother’s provision of “excess” breastmilk to a private company that was processing it and selling it at a profit. Why did mothers give their milk? Because they were convinced that they were helping others in need and that they could do this without cost.

This is not unique to breastmilk. It is not enough to just write about this in the distant realm of academia. Those who engage in social reproductive labour work hard; giving in the home, caring for their own children, for other peoples’ children, and for other family members in a multitude of ways. The way that social reproduction is organised in capitalist society has relied upon and entrenched social divisions and continued oppression along classed, gendered and racialised lines. Those from oppressed groups are on average paid less, more likely to be in precarious employment, and in jobs that are undervalued in a capitalist society, such as care work.

For this exhibition, the art conveys how work and bodies get devalued. This feminist exhibition is about showcasing this gendered work: to acknowledge, to grieve, and importantly, to connect with one another. 

We are showcasing mother/artists who question the value that society puts on their work, including all kinds of labour. The list of our Essential Work is endless and it holds up the world.

We ask:

What is the value of reproductive labour today? How does it relate to other forms of paid and unpaid work?