Women in the Picture by Catherine McCormack

Author:Catherine McCormack [McCormack, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Eti Wade, from the Migrant Mothers series

Ukeles, Morisot and Wade’s art asks us to think about the intersections of class and gender and how value is attached or denied to different sorts of women, their labour and their roles as mothers – whether the creative labour of art making, the procreative labour of making and raising children, or the labour of looking after other people’s families.

Finally, in my house it’s the close of the day. I lie down in bed with each child in turn to read stories, to chat, to absorb the syrupy smell of their hair as they drift off to sleep after many kisses and mutual affirmations of love. It is here that I find the stillness I was craving; bolstered by the heat and weight of their little bodies, my mind can finally wander freely, my thoughts tracing patterns across the dark ceiling with its sprinkle of softly fluorescent stars. I often linger long after they doze off, suspended in the stasis of the dark bedroom, before I leave them and open up the bonfire blaze of my computer screen to work, writing long into the quiet, blue hours.

Turning out the lights on the stairs, I catch a glimpse of a blurred reflection in the window that makes me jump, although I know it is me. My appearance is spectral against the inky expanse on the other side of the thick glass, its outline appears doubled, the two versions overlapping, struggling to match. I peer through my own reflection and into the window of a house on the other side of the dark street, where a light has been left on over a kitchen sink, a moth circling the bulb. Caught here momentarily on the stairs, I realise that the image I see in the window, the mother, the writer, the woman, the maintenance worker, the thinker, is someone I only half know. She is not the beatific Virgin in the hortus conclusus, nor the tidy yummy mummy, nor the angel in the house (nor the milf). Like Morisot’s women, her presence is uncertain; she is someone who is half seen even to me, someone who I don’t have any pictures of.

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