During maternity leave with my first and only child, I began making a series of performances under the title Maternal Matters. Like all new parents, I found myself awake during the night, feeding and pacing and soothing my baby. I became interested in these durational acts of walking and carrying, their toll on the body and the labour required to feed a child. In the middle of the night, after several unsuccessful weeks breastfeeding, I would routinely be found mixing and shaking formula milk. How abruptly life had changed from the 2am kitchen parties: music blaring, sticky sweet alcohol, soft lighting. Now a new mixologist, on sterilised surfaces, working by the light of the fridge to quickly prepare the only cocktail on the menu.
I’ve enjoyed working with fruit throughout Maternal Matters. The stimulus was an app which charted the growth of my baby in the womb, growing from a poppy seed all the way to the size of a watermelon at 40 weeks gestation. I explored all these fruit for their texture and weight, the sound as they’re cut into, their taste and smell: The watermelon with its weighty roundness, hiding surprisingly red flesh beneath its scaled protective skin. I experimented with dropping the watermelon and watched it bruise. I held on to it tight and protected it as best I could. But most importantly, I ate it, for what else is watermelon for if not to eat? I ate it over and over, to nourish myself. As a symbol of the 40-week foetus, I was devouring my baby back inside me, to where it is closest to me and safe. Strange, this seed which grows inside us, this body which consumes and expels, a reminder of the body in all its messy glory, which connects us back to our mothers, and their mothers before them.
Over lockdown I realised I wouldn’t be able to have another child. I spent hours carving out watermelons, emptying their shells, the contents of them spilling across the kitchen table. I created a durational performance called Missed where I laboured through this repetitive carving action. The audience were invited to use the flesh to make a margarita. A kind of warped cocktail hour. Or perhaps this is the After Party. A communal space where the audience is nourished. A moment of joy and celebration. A moment to toast the mother’s labour. A kind of ritual where I offer my ‘flesh’. The empty watermelon skins pile up discarded and decaying. The eternal mother, the giver of life, the host, the nourisher, the bleeder, the empty womb.
Stills from a filmed version of Missed by Roland Turner.