Working not Working
Collection:UAL Art Collection
Date: 2021
Artist: Claire Lawrie (British)
Dimensions:
10 min 58 sec
Medium: Video
Object number: UAC 1035
DescriptionClaire studied MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and BA Photography at London College of Communication. She says this piece 'focuses on a new mother as she breastfeeds her child over the first year of his life. A fixed frame film, the camera stays as still as its subject as she voices various questions about her new role, maternal work, time, and her body through interviews made over the year. Here I focus on the lived experience of one mother, to reconceive the construction of maternity as completely innate, by presenting both maternal love, and maternal ambivalence. Influenced by slow cinema, ethnographic film making, psychoanalytical texts, feminist discourse and resistance. The film closes as the child feeds the mother, marking this time and particular embodied experience.'