Picturing Mother and Child

Konrad Winkler

Julie, Isabella and Charlotte

Silver gelatin selenium toned print

20 x 29 cm

The Cunningham Dax Collection

The Dax Centre houses a collection of works made by people suffering mental illness or emotional trauma, collected between 1950 and 1980. In the exhibition 'Picturing Mother and Child' we see images that artists have made of some of the darkest and loneliest moments of motherhood. Many show spiky, visceral births, tiny shrivelled babies attaching like parasites and moments of sheer exhaustion and lethargy at the constant grind. These are contrasted with several simple Madonna and Child drawings that evoke the beauty and tenderness of motherhood.

One series of works in particular evokes these conflicting images of motherhood. It is a series of pictures made by an anonymous woman who had had many children and was also a patient at the Victorian Psychiatric Hospital. This series of bright works painted in 1957 often show a woman breastfeeding her child, wearing a Madonna like veil. Next to her, prudish women and men crinkle up their one lined caricatured noses to suggest their disapproval and disgust. The baby is tiny. In another, one of these a big nosed women pokes her head into the pram as though sniffing the very vulnerable baby. One shows a mother child compositionally shoved in a corner as brightly striped Flemington jockeys and horses walked obliviously across this contemporary nativity stable. This painting speaks of a sense of the invisibility of the everyday miracles of this bond and the profound intensity of the emotional state a new mother experiences. These pictures evoke the real chasm between the ideal and the reality of motherhood. Even in moments where a mother may feel like the soft and nurturing Madonna, feeding this beautiful baby—there is always an outside world of strangers, sisters,  books on sleep by women named Tizzy and Pinky, helpful friends, mothers and maternal health nurses who are ready and willing to inform new mothers that they are doing it wrong. 

New mothers are the easiest targets because they want so desperately to do everything right by their baby. They face not only having to confront their own ideas about how they were parented and how they choose to parent this child but also contain so many of the projections based on regrets and desires of other people of the outside world who want to impart their wisdom to new parents. Donald Winnicott, a mid twentieth century English paediatrician, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst coined the term “the good enough mother”. To Winnicott, the concept of the perfect or ideal mother was not only unrealistic but undesirable. Just as the mother who is also a virgin is the stuff of myth or faith, the mother who denies her feelings of ambivalence at times or feels a need to be “the best” will inevitably fail and could most possibly pass that sense of failure onto the child. In the words of Martha Nussbaum, who has been a proponent of his work, the relationship between a mother and child was one of those "highly particular transactions that constitute love between two imperfect people”. The “good enough mother” is one who doesn’t need the child to be a perfect child as some sort of reflection of herself.

Konrad Winkler

Julie and Isabella

Silver gelatin selenium toned print

20 x 29 cm

The Cunningham Dax Collection

In many of these images, the women seem torn by guilt or a sense of failure and have lost the sense of their own goodness and their ability to really hold their baby. In one particularly striking gauche painting of 1966, a woman has drawn herself as made of big green empty circles. The figure has a green empty tummy, green empty head and green empty breasts with small black baby hanging from one of them. The image seems so childlike in its technique but offers a very melancholy and desperate cry through its bold dark brush strokes. The woman can simply not hold or contain the hunger, the rage and the desperate neediness of the child.

In the collaboration between Julie Goodwin (mother) and Konrad Winkler (photographer) we see a really interesting insight into post natal depression. With great pathos, Winkler photographed Goodwin over a period of two years with weekly visits to her house or studio. The photographs show Goodwin trapped and claustrophobic, in one literally bound up, in the domestic. The most striking photograph is of Goodwin sitting in a chair, like she is holding on. Her head is back but her jaw seems clenched and her eyes are distant. In the background a demanding daughter Isabella is screaming at her while riding her bike. By the shape of her mouth we imagine the long and drawn out “Muuuuuuuummmm” as she circles perhaps again and again and again. Winkler suggested at the time that Goodwin start keeping a diary and draw a portrait of herself each day. Some of these documents are also in the exhibition. Goodwin described them as “getting something positive from this cruel infliction. They were small steps that gave me hope”. 

Julie Goodwin

No Title

Oil pastel and coloured pencil on paper

21 x 14.8 cm each

The Cunningham Dax Collection

These artists and mothers seem to have given and given to the point of depletion. The viewer hopes that these works, as tangible outcomes of therapy, have been part of a process whereby the artists have been given some nurture, kindness and understanding. The nature of The Dax Centre’s collection raises some really interesting ideas about art in therapy. It is a means for making powerful and honest art about very real but rarely discussed human conditions. 

About the Cunningham Dax Collection

The Cunningham Dax Collection, amassed over a 70 year period, consists of over 15,000 artworks including works on paper, photography, paintings, sculptural work, journals, digital media and video created by people with an experience of mental illness and psychological trauama. The Cunningham Dax Collection is part of the Dax Centre. The Dax Centre promotes mental health and wellbeing by fostering a greater understanding of the mind, mental illness and trauma through art and creativity. For more information on the Cunningham Dax Collection and the Dax Centre, visit: www.daxcentre.org

Picturing Mother and Child

17 Nov 2010 to 9 April 2011

Anna Newbold