Why do we have children? The voices ask. For experiencing our own bodies (Plath’s The Unabridged Journals). For how they attach us to others, despite knowing it can be hard (Lessing’s Under My Skin: Volume One). For having a chance of being the mothers we didn’t have (Griffin’s Feminism and Motherhood). Because they are the reason we work and finish the work important to us (Walker’s “A Writer Because of, Not in Spite of, Her Children”). For Davey and many mothers before her, cleanliness appears as one of the guiding threads. It represents the impossibility of motherhood as an ideal, and the transcendence to be found even in its imperfections.

Women are now more likely to attend art schools, and equally present on the art market in their early careers. But gender inequalities get ever stronger in their 30s, an age at which women are likely to become mothers. Based on a study for Freelands on this phenomena, the book takes us through the different spheres in which artist mothers are disadvantaged, and what they’re doing about it.

Designing Motherhood brings to the foreground objects that are not obviously designed, would not usually be included in a design exhibition, but had to be conceived by someone. They contribute to a sense of shared experience around birth: why are they invisibilized?

“It is ultimately character that underwrites art. The quality of art can only reflect the quality and range of a person’s sensitivity, intellect, perception, and experience. [...] Sometimes artists use their work for ends that have nothing to do with art, placing it rather at the service of their ambitions for themselves in the world. “