Mother and Child was born in the aftermath of my first child's birth.  I was throwing bowls on the wheel, the first time I'd gotten back into the studio after M was born.  When I am throwing I get the first few right and then one piece gets overstretched in a slick of clay slip and flops over. This doesn't worry me as working with clay is a constant learning curve and noone can throw on the wheel and not make mistakes.  As Grayson Perry remarked in his Reith Lecture - "Your mistakes is your style."  And so it was that day.  I was tightly coiled from sleepless nights and identity struggles, attempting to get back to my calling.  I had been through the most devastating, limit-testing, visceral experience of my life to have my daughter.  When the bowl went wrong I exhaled in disappointment and felt something click.  I had been through a transformation beyond my wildest imagination, oh so unprepared, and the ensuing art was my reaction.

I looked down at the soft torn brown mess on my wheel head.  I saw what I imagined my vulva to look like during and after my child's birth, which happened only with the assistance of a softly calming obsterician and her tools: scalpel and forceps.  And her surgical theatre colleagues: midwife, aneasthnatist and many other praiseworthy NHS professionals.  Blood was gushing, which I perceived in the petrified pools of my gentle husband's eyes.  What a terrible gift childbirth was for us both. 

On my wheelhead, undulating, ripped clay, I felt words come to me and with the only writing medium to hand, red clay slip, I scrawled words on my studio wall with my finger:

cut

push

pull

prolapse

stretch

tear

The last word has two meanings and both are relevant to my birth experiences.  It occured to me that I was in exactly the place to express what I could not say, that I did not have the words for.  I dripped and drizzled white slip over the forms like blood and birth fluids pouring.  I tore the clay, just as my daughter had pushed and torn through my birth canal.  I scratched with wires to create a hair effect.  I stuck the potter's knife in and pulled upwards, the clay collapsing back in on and over itself.  Stretching beyond the limit, pushing fingertips in, scraping softness with sharp tools.  Stretch, sweep, vaginal examinations left me violated. 

This group's name is 'Mother and Child' for two reasons. The first being to subvert the concept of twee, matyring artworks that idiolise a false percption of motherhood; saccharine mothers looking sweetly down at their impeccably behaved babes.  Propaganda, created to shame mothers into accepting the role and the servitude that comes with it.  These abstract sculptures show no figurative mother nor a round cheeked child but a lumpen mass.  

The second reason is that only a mother and a baby in the flow of being born can create this unique form of violence.  These are the invisible physical consequences of birth.  The impact on the mother's birthing body is symbolised by the tears, cuts, slits, slack skin, jagged edges and the holes made by the midwife or doctor's needle to repair the damage.  

What of the other damage?  That is for another piece.