The Mothering Thicket: Investigating the Impact of Transgenerational Trauma through Installation Based Print Practice.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Mothering Thicket is a theoretical and practical investigation which explores the complexities of mothering, acknowledging the effects of trans-generational trauma through the process of art practice. It creates space for conversations and maybe transformation through the healing rituals of narrative and art production. It looks at the varied work of other artists—some of whom are mothers, all of whom have been subject to experiences of stress or anxiety. They included Australian artists; Sally Smart, and Izabela Pluta. Irish artist, Mary Kelly. Canadian Artist, Jennifer Linton, French/American artist, Louise Bourgeois and German Expressionist, Käthe Kollwitz. I have also collaborated with my adult child, dancer, Lorcan Power, as well as sound artist, Dylan Marélic-Mcintyre and cinematographer, Darwin Schultz. My own art practice drew on analysis and research to provide insight into affective art, aspects of mothering and familial attachment. Research was influenced by early feminist writers; Julia Kristeva and Adrienne Rich and by contemporary thinkers; Gail Weiss, Nicole Moulding, and Margrit Shildrick, psychologists; Donald Winnicott, Jacob B. Priest and psychiatrist, Gerrit Glas. I argue that the suppression of knowledge surrounding trans-generational trauma’s effects on mothering greatly impacts on societal expectations of mothering – presenting a gap in contemporary fine art for more challenging and complex depictions of difficult mothering. My experience of raising a child with mental health issues, having also been a child exposed to trauma, had given me a direct personal perspective of ‘motherblame’ and other negative constructions of mothering. This has revealed the need for a space where narratives of complex experiences of mothering can be contemplated without judgement; where mother, child and audience can feel safe, secure, seen, and supported to experience an art installation about mothering trauma. In my artwork, I applied principles of attachment theory to generate a safer environment where people felt supported and secure enough to contemplate memories of stress encounters, utilising my artwork to express the various narratives of traumatic experiences of mothering. Although art cannot resolve all mothering wounds it can provide a space, in the middle of the thicket, for the beginning of a conversation, or at least encourage a start to confronting all mothering experiences.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".