Mother-Artists

Beneath the tired notion that women must choose between art and motherhood lies the far more exhilarating question of how a woman’s creativity might explode in motherhood. Neuropsychologist Rex Jung, who believes creativity is a survival mechanism we have developed over the millennia, hypothesises that the demands of caring for a baby kicks the brain into a kind of problem-solving overdrive. ‘In periods of extreme pressure,’ Jung theorises, ‘when mothers are going through massive changes in their bodies, diets and hormones, that is when creativity should emerge as a highly adaptive reasoning process.’

Mother-artists or artist-mothers do indeed innovate of necessity. No longer able to ‘think in any sustained way’ after becoming a mother, Jenny Offill crafted Dept. of Speculationout of the fragmented thoughts she was able to get down, producing a novel form that so profoundly reflects the ‘fractured consciousness’ of motherhood that fragmentation has become something of a convention in the genre of motherhood writing.

LAURA VOGT

Titles By This Author

WOMAN, IDLE

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