Maternity beyond metaphor: Painting, the studio and the lived experience of sexual difference in the work of Virginia Bodman

Abstract

This article attends to the practice of painter Virginia Bodman (1954) to illuminate the gap between the operations of the maternal body as a metaphor for painting in phenomenology, and the lived experience of that body inside and outside the painter’s studio. Structured in three sections, it offers close readings of works made by Virginia Bodman over a period of 26 years. Bodman had been a painter of considerable professional standing by the time she became pregnant with her first child in 1988. This article considers the way in which the push and pull of liquid matter reveals a becoming-mother’s negotiation of the transformation of the self and history in paint. In so doing, it mobilizes Griselda Pollock’s (1999) argument that the mother/Other can be a site of political agency. To consider the complex questions of immersivity, professional identity and time in the context of maternal experience is to enable a reappraisal of the radical conceptual value that Elkins (1999) and Merleau-Ponty (1961) assigned to the maternal body as a metaphor of painting and studio practice. This article argues that the tangle of matter, movement and memory in Bodman’s dialogues with Picasso and Vaughan illuminate strategies to overcome this professional displacement.