Issues on Creativity in the Arts : On the Relation between Creativity & Motherhood

In 2011, while living in the UK a war started in Syria, my home country, and tore it to pieces. In response, I took a refuge in creativity while following an organised plan and a predicted timeline to explore my questions. After dealing with war and death for too long, a new life started in my family with the birth of my daughter on 12th Nov. 2018. Since then, I have been trying to reoccupy my creative space and similarly to the previous project, let this life-changing event take over my creative interests. However, this turned to be not a straightforward path, but a challenging and interrupted one, in which creativity started to slip away and inspiration became distant. In this paper, I would like to take a personal approach to explore the ways in which creativity is manifesting itself (or not) while being a mother and how to try and revive it in the midst of the emotionally and physically challenging environment of motherhood. This will be discussed through reflections, theories, interviews and a number of art work examples. One of the obvious solutions is to let the way life unfolds as a mother inform creative solutions. Lenka Clayton for example proposed to allow her new responsibility as a mother to direct her creative practice, by starting an art residency in her own home; ‘I will undergo this self-imposed artist residency in order to fully experience and explore the fragmented focus, nap-length studio time, limited movement and resources and general upheaval that parenthood brings and allow it to shape the direction of my work, rather than try to work “despite” it’ (Lenka, 2012). After becoming a mother, the perspective on the whole world changes, which inherently changes our creative output. But what happens when we try to separate ‘it’ from our creative identity and consciously apply an absolute division? Is there a way in which both can work and inform the meaning of each other?