Words: Charlotte Philby
Images: Tom Little
Being an artist and a full-time mum is “very difficult”. As Lenka Clayton discovered when she had her first child, three years ago. “Before I had my son I’d travelled a lot, exhibited and been part of residencies all over the place. Suddenly I wasn’t able to move anymore, and found lots of residencies don’t accommodate families.”
That was in 2011. Since when Clayton, a Cornwall-born interdisciplinary artist who trained in documentary film-making, and works across sculpture, textiles, photography, among a multitude of media, decided to use her work to explore her new role as a mother: “The idea was to look at things about parenthood that are usually obstacles to working – the anxiety, exhaustion, the lack of time and resources – and using those subjects to work from rather than as things that get in the way.”
63 Objects Taken from My Son's Mouth / limited edition book / Design: Brett YaskoThe result was a series of projects including the photographic archive ’63 Objects From My Son’s Mouth’ (selected images below), and a compelling collection of three films called ‘The Distance I Can Be From My Son’ (bottom of page), which Clayton describes as “an attempt to objectively measure the furthest distance I can be from my son in a variety of environments. In each film, in three different environments, my son wanders into shot and then away from the camera. I allow him to go far as I can until I feel that panic; it is a physical measure of this emotional distance.”
Such pieces, says Clayton, who has lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the past five years, and is primary carer to her two children – now aged 3 and one and a half – have allowed her “the space to step out and look in from the outside… to have a distance from the everyday ongoing experience”. Part of a larger project called Residency in Motherhood, such work is, she says, “a way to explore this really subjective experience which is usually private; the experience of me as a particular mum with a particular child, and re-present that as an experience which other people can step into and share.”
“Having kids really transformed my practice,” she adds. “Before having children I did very involved, labour-intensive projects. Now I don’t have time for that kind of working but actually it has helped me to observe better. Now I’m making more art than I did before I had kids. I have less time but strangely motherhood allows me to be bit looser, and more playful and bit less precious.”
