Naissance

Aimee Koran is a multi-disciplinary artist from Philadelphia. She holds a BFA in 3D Fine Arts & Textiles from Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia (2013) and an MFA from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2017). Her primary artistic concerns are with the personal and collective stories that shape our everyday lives, yet are often overlooked. By centring the labour of motherhood and subtly altering familiar objects, the artist creates tangible evocations of abstract concepts such as care and the passage of time.

Recent solo exhibitions include Moments of Memories, Abington Art Center, Abington (2022) and The Let Down, Arlington Arts Center, Arlington (2018). Recent group exhibitions include Designing Motherhood, Gates Foundation Discovery Center, Seattle (2023); Family Matter, Gross McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia (2023); At Play, Gallery 360, Boston (2022); and Verso: A Virtual Sehnsucht Exhibition, Field Projects Gallery, New York (2022).

El Morgan is an artist and writer working with video, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. She holds a BA in Fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University (2001), MA in Fine Art from University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2004) and PhD from Slade School of Fine Art, London (2013). Her practice explores our entanglement with other species, which has included serenading a spider, making a diamond from the dead creatures of the River Thames and embracing a giant green sea anemone.

Recent exhibitions include Tale of the frozen bits, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2023); 100 ways to say we, Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice (2021) and Le Mostra della Laguna, Sale Docks, Venice (2021–22). Her book Gossamer Days: spiders, humans and their threads (Strange Attractor Press, 2016) was selected as a book of the year by The Guardian. She has received funding from Arts Council England, the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, Leverhulme Trust, and Royal Institute of British Architects.

Ashley January (b. 1987) is an American visual artist based in Chicago, with a BS in Communication, including a minor in Studio Art, from Bradley University, Peoria (2009) and an MFA in Painting from the Laguna College of Art and Design, Laguna Beach (2017). Following the artist’s experience of birth trauma, she has worked with families and medical organisations addressing the Black maternal health crisis in America. She considers her painting and multimedia practice as part of a call to action for awareness, research and the eradication of unnecessary maternal and infant death.

The artist was a finalist for the 2022 Artadia Chicago Award and the second instalment of her solo exhibition, Human | Mother | Black, opened at Western Illinois University in January 2023. Most recently, her work was featured at Platform Art Fair with Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London. Her works have been exhibited at numerous venues including the Young Masters Autumn Exhibition, London; South Side Community Art Center, Chicago; Mana Contemporary, Chicago; Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago; Pacific Art Foundation, Newport Beach; and Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine. 

Fani Parali (b. 1983) is a Greek artist who currently lives and works in London. She received a BA in Sculpture from Camberwell College of Arts, London (2014) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at Royal Academy Schools, London (2017). Her practice encompasses sculpture, sound, performance, large-scale painting, drawing and moving image. Parali creates choreographed meetings between different medium components, often by collaborating with performers. Her aim is to create a sense of intimacy, shared aloneness and warmth, exemplified in the tenderness of the personal graphite works that commemorate the difficult early weeks of her son’s life.

Her recent solo exhibitions include Aonyx And Drepan & The Minders Of The Warm, Southwark Park Galleries, London (2020) and The Terrace of Lungs, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2019). Selected group exhibitions include Can you hear it?, Cooke Latham, London (2022) and Sentient Summer with Sam Austen, Sundy, London (2021).

Cassie Arnold (b. 1986, Texas) holds a BFA in Visual Art Studies from the University of North Texas, Denton (2008). Her work explores the unspoken and taboo topics connected to womanhood, using traditional fibre techniques to challenge dominant definitions of femininity. Whether referencing miscarriage, breastfeeding or the transformative female form, her work pushes back against the stereotypes surrounding women, their bodies, their work and their capabilities.

Recent exhibitions include Fantastic Fibers International Exhibition, Yeiser Art Center, Paducah; Maternal Perspective, Durand Art Institute, Lake Forest; Care and Collaboration, Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, Lubbock (all 2023); Oh, Mother, A National Juried Exhibition at Hera Gallery, Wakefield (2023); Collective Healing, Spilt Milk Gallery, Edinburgh (2022); Fiberart International, Pittsburgh, where she received First Prize (2022); Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize, London (2021); and Mother Art Prize, London (2020).

Ellie Lobovits (b. 1980) is a visual artist, writer and midwife-in-training based in Brooklyn. She holds an MA in Visual Anthropology from San Francisco State University and was a 2020 New Jewish Culture Fellow. Self-portraiture, imagery of the natural world and first-person narratives are recurring elements in her exploration of the intersections of feminist identity, the body, land, loss and memory. Interweaving autobiographical elements with current socio-political issues, she explores what occurs in the space of juxtaposition between private and public spheres.

Lobovits’ Fertility Series is currently on view in the group show Material/Inheritance at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and select images from this series were published in Jewish Currents (Summer 2022). Her 2018 documentary film, Birth on the Border, explores childbirth and legal border-crossing on the US-Mexico border and is a Women Make Movies release. Her photography zine Night Flowers is carried by Printed Matter Books.

Sally Butcher is an artist, lecturer, researcher and (m)other in Birmingham. She is currently pursuing an AHRC-funded PhD at the School of Art & Cultural Studies, Birmingham City University and the Centre for Reproduction Research, De Montfort University. Her interdisciplinary feminist practice engages the domestic, maternal and sexualised spheres of female subjectivity and embodiment. Embracing her practice as research, she is driven by a theoretical and critical focus which also fuels her teaching.

Butcher’s Arts Council funded project ‘Re.conceive: Infertility in the Maternal Visual Arts’ (2020–21) saw her work featured in Elephant and Maternal Art magazines, Mothers Who Make, Artist Mother Podcast, Female Photographers, Procreate Project, Coventry Biennial, and shortlisted for Jerwood Photoworks Award 2021 and Brixton Art Prize 2022. She regularly presents research at conferences and her peer-reviewed essays will be published in the anthologies An Artist and A Mother and Infertilities: A Curation in 2023.

Anna Perach (b. 1985) is a Ukrainian-born Israeli artist living and working in London. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London (2020). Perach uses the tufting technique to create handmade carpet textiles, which she transforms into elaborate wearable sculptures used in her performances. Exploring the dynamic between personal and cultural myths, she interweaves female archetypes into sculptural hybrids in order to examine ideas of identity, gender and craft.

Recent solo and duo exhibitions include Spidora, Edel Assanti, London (2022); As She Laughs, with Anousha Payne, Cooke Latham, London; The Moon Prophecy, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; and Gasp, ADA, Rome (all 2021). Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, Rugby (2022); Sarabande Foundation, London; Vitrine, Basel; and Ryder Projects, Madrid (all 2021). Perach was awarded the Ingram Prize in 2021, as well as a studio award with Sarabande Foundation and the Gilbert Bayes Award, both in 2020.

Flora Bradwell is a London-based artist and curator. She completed her MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2021, receiving the Felix Slade Award, Jeanne Szego Prize and Sarabande Emerging Artist Bursary during her time there. Her practice is characterised by a playful carnivalesque and vibrant aesthetic, appropriating visual tropes to demonstrate the “ridiculousness of the patriarchal system”. Encompassing painting, sculpture, video and performance, her work revels in the generously grotesque.

Selected exhibitions include Fleshy Magic, Somers Gallery, London (2023); Try a little… Tenderness, Liminal Gallery, Margate (2023); Best of BF Artist Film Festival, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); In Bloom, Future DMND, Los Angeles (2022); and Phlorysta, Rua do Grillo, Lisbon (2020). She received the a-n Artist Bursary, Gilbert Bayes Award and became Artist in Residence at the Van Gogh Huis, Zundert (all 2023), as well as a residency at Elephant Lab, London (2022). Bradwell’s curatorial roles include co-director at Bad Art and curator at Inland Project.

Sarah Greaves is an award-winning, mixed-media, socially engaged artist based in Manchester. In her practice, she explores the layers of transition and change through manipulated found objects, installations, soundscapes and sculptures. These include a large-scale installation about the psychological transition of motherhood, embroidering domestic objects with political texts and inner monologues, and examining objects passed down through the Manchester Armenian diaspora and the stories they hold.

Created following extensive research with mothers and perinatal health professionals, her installation The Other in Mother was shown at Manchester Art Gallery, Gallery Oldham, Leeds Museum, Macclesfield Library, and Arc Centre & Gallery in 2018. Selected group exhibitions include Doing It Over the Kitchen Table, curated by HOME, Manchester (2017); In Emergency: Break Glass, Manchester Art Gallery (2014); and Handmade Futures, CONTACT, Manchester (2013).

Shweta Bist (b. 1980) was born in New Delhi, India and currently lives and works in New York. She earned her master’s degree in commerce from Delhi University and is an alumna of the School of Visual Arts Continuing Education in New York. Inspired by personal narratives, her photographic work is an exploration of maternal subjectivity. Having begun her professional career in the financial sector, it assumed a creative direction after she became a mother to her two daughters.

Recent exhibitions include Oh, Mother, Hera Gallery, Wakefield; Time/Space, Compère Collective, Brooklyn; Maternal Interior, A2AC, Ann Arbor; Procreate Project Archive, with Buildhollywod, London (all 2023) and Constructions/Connections, South x Southeast Gallery, Molena (2022).  She has also presented her work at academic and art conferences on motherhood studies, and is an artist mentor with Spilt Milk Gallery, Edinburgh.

Hettie Judah is chief art critic on the British daily paper The i, a regular contributor to The Guardian’s arts pages, and a columnist for Apollo magazine. Following publication of her 2020 study on the impact of motherhood on artists’ careers, in 2021 she worked with a group of artists to draw up the manifesto How Not To Exclude Artist Parents, now available in 15 languages. She recently published the book How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (Lund Humphries, 2022) and her work in this field includes the Hayward Touring exhibition On Art and Motherhood (opening at Arnolfini, Bristol in March 2024) and an accompanying publication. In 2022, together with Jo Harrison, she co-founded the Art Working Parents Alliance – a supportive network and campaigning group for those working in the arts.

Pregnant Then Screwed is a charity dedicated to ending the motherhood penalty, supporting tens of thousands of women each year and successfully campaigning for change.

54,000 women a year lose their job simply for getting pregnant – that’s a woman every 10 minutes in the UK – and 77% of working mothers experience negative and potentially discriminatory treatment at work. We know that by the time a woman’s first child is 12 years old, her hourly pay rate is 33% behind a man’s – not because she is not talented enough, or doesn’t want to work, but because of the hundreds of barriers women encounter when trying to have children and a career.