This summer, the Lawrence Arts Center is thrilled to be partnering with curators Rachel Epp Buller and Maria Velasco to bring Making It Work to Lawrence; a show about being an artist and being a parent and exploring and navigating where they intersect. What does it mean to be an artist? What does it mean to be a parent? How can you incorporate one into the other? Six artists from around the country have answered those questions and have created work that incorporates their family life into their artistic practice.
Each artist has their own unique practice and way of interweaving their family life and artistic practice. Here, we are having a discussion with Making It Work artist, Lise Haller Baggesen regarding her body of work and her featured installation, Mothernism. A project that she started ten years ago.
Lise Haller Baggesen’s Mothernism is a nomadic tent camp, audio installation, and a book, dedicated to staking out and making speakable the “mother-shaped hole in contemporary art discourse.”
Since 2013, the installation has traveled extensively in the United States, Canada, and Europe, including The Contemporary Austin (TX) The Poor Farm in Manawa (WI) A.I.R. Gallery in New York (NY), and Astrid Noack’s Atelier in Copenhagen (DK). It served as the mothership for the symposium Mapping the Maternal: Art Ethics and the Anthropocene at the University of Alberta, Canada (2016) and spawned the curatorial project 3 am Maternal at Vox Populi in Philadelphia, as well as the international summits The Mothernists I + II in Rotterdam (2015) and Copenhagen (2017). The events hosted panel discussions, performances, and presentations of academic and artistic research practices, related to maternal (aest-)ethics and the politics and poetics of care work and were presented in collaboration with M/other Voices (NL) and The Royal Danish Academy of Art (DK).
Mothernism (the book) was published in 2014 by Green Lantern Press and Poor Farm Press. It was reviewed in Newcity, Art21, KQED, and Hyperallergic.
Lise Haller Baggesen (1969) is a Danish born, Amsterdam trained, Chicago based interdisciplinary artist. Her hybrid practice includes writing, installation, performative, sartorial, and textile-based work. She is the author of Mothernism, and exhibits internationally, most recently with her refuseniks wearables, the variety show Boulevard Dreamers, and the multi-media performance HATORADE RETROGRADE: THE MUSICAL. She is an alumni of the Rijksakademie van Beelden Kunsten in Amsterdam, and holds an MA in Visual and Critical studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a recipient of the Dutch Royal Prize for Painting and a nominee for the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Emerging Artist Grant.