Live Art and Motherhood Study Room Guide Launch

Live Art and Motherhood: A Study Room Guide on Live Art and the Maternal
Launch event

Live Art and Motherhood is a new Study Room Guide on Live Art and the Maternal researched and written by the artists, activists and academics Emily Underwood-Lee and Lena Šimić.  

The Guide features fourteen individual artists and two artist collectives working in the mediums of Live Art and performance around the topic of the maternal, who have all set out to make performance and/or Live Art work about their particular maternal experience.  The Guide maps these artists’ works and themes, creating an archive, and, on a pragmatic as well as highly political level, giving visibility to this field and proclaiming maternal agencies through and in arts making.  The Guide also recommends wider materials to watch and read around the subject.

Please join us for an evening to launch the Guide.  Emily and Lena will show extracts from selected works, ‘perform’ a conversation about the project, invite contributing artists to talk about their work and facilitate wider discussions about performance and the maternal.

Drinks will be served

“With this Study Room Guide we wish to bring the mother centre stage, to celebrate the diversity of maternal performance practice and artworks by mothers about mothering… we wish to be part of the current movement to name maternal performance aesthetics and explore them deeper.” Emily Underwood-Lee and Lena Šimić

Emily Underwood-Lee is a failing feminist mother to two daughters.  She is also performance practitioner and Research Fellow at the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling at the University of South Wales. 

Lena Šimić is a mother of four boys, performance practitioner, pedagogue and scholar, Senior Lecturer in Drama at Edge Hill University and co-organizer of the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home. 

As part of the continuous development of the Study Room we regularly commission artists and thinkers to write Study Room Guides on specific themes to help users navigate through this resource, experience the materials in a new way, and highlight titles that they may not have otherwise come across.

View all Study Room Guides