Re-Making Time

Fran Callen’s recent exhibition Timetable, developed in collaboration with staff and students at Adelaide College of the Arts, is satisfyingly messy. The space looks less like a gallery than a studio, and less like a studio than the remnants of a thoroughly enjoyed evening. Two large canvases, each one installed on a table and strewn with objects, occupy the centre of the room. They bear the marks of many hands, densely layered with stains and images, tracings and scribbled text. Before they were installed in the gallery, these canvases occupied a teaching studio, and then a staff room at Adelaide College of the Arts. Callen, in her capacity as a lecturer, laid them over tables and invited outside contribution.

In the classroom, Callen and her students would gather around the canvas, plonking down drink bottles and journals—whatever their hands were holding—and begin to make their marks. The traced outlines of their haphazardly placed paraphernalia were later presented to the ceramics department so that lecturer Alison Smiles and her students might restore negative space to three-dimensional form. Once bisque-fired, these objects were returned to the drawing students as new surfaces to work upon.  

The exhibition’s messy aesthetic reflects Callen’s approach to collaboration, and to teaching, which prioritises process and interaction and applies a light touch when guiding the outcomes of others. The works record not only technical demonstrations and student exercises but also moments of playful experimentation and snippets of wide-ranging conversations.

Callen’s art school collaboration can be seen as an extension of her existing practice, which in recent years has been grounded in her experiences as a mother and an artist. Installed on the walls of the gallery are two of the artist’s earlier tabletop works, these ones produced at home with her children as collaborators. They provide a foundation for the exhibition, giving context to the process used, as well as greater depth. This is because Callen’s decision to integrate her teaching and creative practice echoes an earlier one, when it was mothering rather than teaching that dominated her days and pushed her art to the peripheries.

The tabletop works began as a solution to the problem of time. In her early years as an artist, Callen maintained a daily drawing practice, an everyday act of creativity that brought her deep satisfaction. Upon becoming a mother, she found the routine impossible to sustain. Motherhood, in its life-altering and all-consuming way, snatched away this precious space and time to think and make, leaving the artist feeling untethered and restless with creative energy.

Rather than resist her newfound circumstances and engage in a constant struggle for studio time, Callen chose to adapt. Placing a canvas on the kitchen table, she brought the studio into her house. The kitchen table, already a focal point for family life, became the nucleus for Callen’s creative output. It was a simple yet transformative act, repositioning the demands of motherhood and studio practice from opposition to alignment. It dissolved the boundaries between two separate and competing spheres, each with its own space and time, and replaced them within a single realm. In this newly constructed space, mothering and artmaking had not only the potential to co-exist but to be mutually supportive.

Half Time Orange (2021) is one of two works in the exhibition that spent time on Callen’s kitchen table. The canvas records the mess of daily meals—spilled drinks and fallen food—as well as the more intentional mark-making of the artist and her children. Sprawling, overlapping stains of turmeric and orange juice suggest an endless cycle of meal preparation, while the traced shapes of hastily laid placemats and playfully arranged spoons record the family’s coming together. Drops of blood-red iron supplement hint at the artist’s fatigue in all the busyness.

Sitting amongst these remnants are three lonely objects delicately detailed in oil: a lemon, a single ‘half-time orange’ wedge, and a Bluey soft toy. Momentarily forgotten, perhaps left behind in the dash to school or Saturday morning sport, these objects extend the work’s overall sense of frenetic family life. The Bluey, however, simultaneously does the exact opposite; its sweet, expectant gaze focusses my attention and holds me for a moment in time. As a stand-in for the young child to which it belongs, the toy foregrounds the maternal love that is at the heart of the repetitive, iron-depleting, busyness that surrounds it. It articulates another of motherhood’s time-based tensions, that the mental and physical labour of caring for a child so often draws time away from being present and engaged in that child’s world. The composition alone forces this kind of split, I am either staring into Bluey’s sweet eyes or roaming the remnants of busy family life.

Callen’s process elegantly integrates the multiple demands on her time. The tabletop canvas simultaneously becomes a place for the artist to engage in creative practice, the busy-work of mothering, and to draw and talk with her children. But it is not merely an act of efficiency, nor is it what I had initially assumed to be multitasking—that stress-inducing, brain-scrambling juggle that assures mediocrity in all things. Callen tells me that on busy days, simply flinging a teabag from cup to canvas enables her to sustain her creative practice. This action is satisfying to the artist not because she is cleverly doing two separate things at once, but because her domestic life and creative life have become so intertwined that both can be privileged in a single gesture.

The integration of maternal and creative work as distinct from the act of multitasking was recently explored by another South Australian artist, Zoe Freney. Her PhD exhibition Making the New, Normal dismantles the stereotype of the multitasking supermom—along with other exploitative representations of motherhood in contemporary western culture—to make space for a more nuanced and subjective exploration of the maternal experience.

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In Gentle Hum (2018), the artist lies on a yoga mat on the floor of a laundromat, watched over by a bunny-suited child in a washing basket. The image contains all the elements of a multitasking supermom—a mother who can simultaneously wash the clothes, play with her child, keep fit, and meditate. Except that none of these things are happening. Instead, the figure lies exhausted on the floor. The room around her warps like the reflection of a washing machine door as if threatening to pull her into the vortex of an endless spin cycle.

The tired trope that women are better multitaskers than men is, like so many mother-myths, used to justify the unequal distribution of domestic labour, to devalue this labour by dismissing it as innate, and to exclude from view anyone that falls outside of the western and heteronormative boundaries it demarcates. Gentle Hum reveals that, in this instance, behind the tired trope is a tired mother, who—worn out from the very real work of mothering—just… can’t… get… up.

As with Callen’s practice, Freney constructs her own space and time in which to be a mother and an artist. The artist observes that in public life “mothers are cast as interrupted subjects, taking time out of work, dropping out of public life, failing to move forwards and progress, positioned as being in domestic standby mode.”(1) It is ironic (but not unexpected) that contemporary western culture represents the life-giving act of mothering as a kind of dead space, and that the work resulting from reproduction is not considered to be productive. Making the New, Normal restores life to this supposedly dead space by privileging the maternal experience as subject matter.

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‍Intimate Structures: smalls (2020) is a delicately detailed set of maternity underwear cut from Belgian linen and one of several hand-sewn works in the exhibition. The work is strikingly beautiful for the time and care taken in making it, despite being in many ways the antithesis of contemporary perceptions of beauty. By employing the traditionally feminine act of sewing and representing the usually private (hidden) subject of the maternal body, Freney asserts the creative potential of the domestic sphere. In doing so, she disrupts the separation of domestic and professional work in favour of a more self-defined and integrated space.

The slow act of hand-sewing a utilitarian object that will never be utilised, at least not for its prescribed function, can also be seen as an act of resistance to neoliberal obsessions with efficiency and productivity. Through this process, Freney seems to be reclaiming her time and what it means, as a mother and an artist, to be productive.

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Freney’s works, like Callen’s, are characterised by a degree of messiness, compositions crowded with the paraphernalia of children and containing elements that appear unfinished. Stuff Mother (2021), a large-scale work on paper, depicts a chaotic mass of objects that combine the artist’s belongings, the loved-to-bits toys of her children, and several household cleaning items. Together they construct a shaky self-portrait that is equal parts humorous, touching, and horrifying. The artist’s body is notably absent, perhaps buried in the enormous pile of stuff.

Callen likewise uses chaotic arrangements of domestic objects to convey both affection (the sweet-eyed Bluey) and the enormity of the task of mothering. In Precarious Tower of Strength (2021), another tabletop work exhibited in Timetable, a tiny figure on hands and knees balances a teetering tower of objects on her back. As she struggles to maintain her strength and the delicate equilibrium of her load, she is instructed by the words: DO NOT SAG.

In both Callen and Freney’s works, the visual language of messiness is used to convey multiple connected ideas. It is, most obviously, a representation of busy family life. By extension, this busyness speaks of the sheer volume of domestic work that falls to these artists as mothers. The spills and stains of Callen’s works and the unfinishedness of Freney’s drawings can also be seen as a form of resistance to representations of motherhood as “an unattainable site of perfection”(2) (Do not sag!).  

Perhaps most interestingly, messiness also seems to translate to a kind of richness, a layering of experiences that convey love, joy, fear, fun, boredom, and unbelievable exhaustion. These layers combine to create deeply affecting and complex portraits of mothering, portraits that destabilise the mother-myths that abound in contemporary western society, but in their subjectivity make no claims to a new overarching mother-identity. Rather, the complicated honesty of the works creates space for a more self-defined, and possibly more fulfilling, experience of mothering—even if it is no less work.

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