Usually she is disappointed
- Submitting institution
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The University of Bolton
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 0049_32_REF2_MM_01
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Art Wall Gallery, Prague; Pineapple Black Gallery, Middlesbrough
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of first exhibition
- October
- Year of first exhibition
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Usually she is disappointed is an exhibition of photographs and video installations exploring the exclusion of the mother from contemporary art.
Contextual information: The exhibition Usually she is disappointed borrows its title from the radical feminist manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex (1970) by Shulamith Firestone. By means of low-res photographs it looks at motherhood, feminism, politics, and the world of work after children. In this series, Martina Mullaney adopted a ‘kitchen table’ aesthetic. She re-photographed and appropriated images from academic books, borrowed images from her Facebook feed and other Facebook users: all mothers. The exhibition is a selection from more than 200 of these images and concentrates on the figure of the “Missing Mother” in the art world.
The research explores the absence of the mother from feminism and art history, asking how contemporary art on maternity, and maternal experiences might integrate with other genres to gain entry to the conventional spaces of art practice and writing.
Considering the social, psychic and symbolic order of the mother, the works of Usually she is disappointed challenge established body-centric art in which the maternal experience is explicit, to adopt more radical activist, social, and political manifestations. The art works employ styles ranging from those derived from the former communist revolutionary aesthetics of the Soviet Union to feminist posters of the 1970s. The colour red is prominent and vital, connoting anger as a visual and intellectual tool.
The research identifies and refigures the mother as a political and social experience, one suppressed by patriarchal neoliberalism that isolates mothers socially, creatively, and intellectually.
The works from Usually she is disappointed have been exhibited at Artwall Gallery Prague October 8 - November 23, 2018 and Pineapple Black Gallery, Middlesbrough January 25 to 21 February 2020.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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