Open Call

About This is Essential Work

If women indeed hold up the world, why are those who perform essential social reproductive labour not paid, or paid so little? Why is our “essential” work devalued? We cannot be content with simply making visible that which is hidden. Nor can we just focus on whether we are paid or not paid for reproductive work. We need to offer a broader view of how, where, when and why our labour and body parts are exploited in the creation of economic value. 

In the first edition of This Is Essential Work, we sought to shine a light on the actual labour of social reproduction. The exhibition focussed on the care and nurture of childbearing and childcare in particular. The work highlighted the invisibility of this labour, which tends to be obscured by maternalistic notions of love and sacrifice. Some of the artworks engaged with questions of commodification, while others evoked the endpoints of work, i.e. exhausted bodies, a tidy sink, a satisfied child. The balance, juggle and contradictions between paid  work and unpaid labour was evident.

Since our first call for artists, the exploitative realities of reproductive care labour have become popular to talk about. The incongruences have also become more popular as the subject of artistic endeavour. The notion, however, that we can dismantle the very systems of social reproductive exploitation is still not that popular. 

This Is Essential Work remains an online open-access intersectional feminist exhibition. It was initiated by academic mothers and creators, Michal Nahman (UWE, Bristol) and Susan Newman (Open University), who seek to explore a visual dialogue between artists worldwide and their academic research (as anthropologist and economist). The initial research began in Bengaluru, India, just before the Covid 19 pandemic. Mothers’ provisions of their own breastmilk were being sold to a private company that was processing and selling it at a profit. This had never been done in such a way before. This year, exactly five years on, Nahman and Newman returned to India with the guidance of Bengaluru-based academic mother - Ranjini Ragavendra. The team’s focus was to better understand processes of extraction and exploitation in regards to the complex experiences of women as they directly and indirectly support the creation of economic value. They met with milk providers, social workers and milk banks. In seeking to highlight the perspectives of those centrally involved, and have that shape the theory, the research team went to rural regions of Karnataka to listen and document the voices of women and the many different views on whether commercial interests should enter the realm of human milk provision. Many of those who were surveyed pointed towards the unethical and exploitative practices of buying and selling mothers milk/breastmilk. For those women who have very limited access to paid work, a meagre income, however limited, is not easily disregarded as few opportunities for paid work exist. We see parallels in industries of surrogacy, egg and sperm providing, blood, uterine, and organ donation. 

We invite artists to engage once again in the development of ideas around the valuation and devaluation of reproductive labour. We invite you to share how your practice, your artwork attempts to visualize the ways in which capitalism systematically devalues social reproduction and care. It’s a common problem within a system of profit. Bigger profit means more grandiose (but often invisible) exploitation. As those in positions of power continue to hold us captive within systems of economic manipulation and harm, how can we change society to avoid valuation based on gender, race or class? Art and artists play a major part in envisioning a different future.

Through this project, we want to build a network of artists, scholars and activists to explore together and to act together with the aim of changing the system that oppresses us all.

We look forward to your artistic perspectives within this framework.

This is Essential Work 2022 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?