COVID Collisions: teaching, making, and mothering in the locked-down domestic space

This paper responds to the prompt that, under the social restrictions of COVID-19, private spaces have increasingly become public, changing the way the domestic space is configured scrutinised, used and shared. The paper reports findings from my recent studio-led PhD project, Making the New, Normal: re-presenting mothers’ subjectivities and their creative potential against persistent patriarchal models. The interruptions of COVID-19 led to an exploration of the ways the pandemic impacted women’s and mothers’ work, care and art-making practices within public and private space. Research shows that while life under COVID-19 was often construed as a ‘new normal,’ there is little new about the gendered division of labour that marks mothering experiences in COVID lockdowns. Instead I argue that forced adaptations in the ways we work, teach and learn, and make art from home may further deepen the problems of the ideologies of neoliberalism. The paper reviews ways mother-artists may imagine solutions to working from home that privilege the domestic sphere as a generative space of care and creative potential.