2023 A Collective Lectures: Swimming in the liminal space within Motherhood by Scarlet Yu

What does it mean to inhabit the space between "mother" and "artist"?
To carry both, sometimes uneasily, sometimes invisibly, sometimes in full view?

The term mother–artist is often used to name a dual identity, a compound role, or a political demand. But I’m not interested in resolving the two into a neat hyphen. Instead, I’m drawn to the liminal space—the space between and around—where these identities press against each other, interrupt each other, or blur into something else entirely.

In this space, I don’t arrive with answers. I arrive with a body full of questions.

I arrive holding time and holding tension.

The artist is often imagined as someone who retreats, resists, claims space. The mother, conversely, is called to serve, to tend, to dissolve into others. These are myths, of course—but powerful ones. And when they collide in a single body, the contradictions don’t disappear. They amplify. They echo through daily routines, decisions, compromises, and longings.

But maybe this is where something begins—not in the resolution, but in the entanglement.

Through M(Other)HOOD, I’ve been exploring mothering as an act, not a role. A choreography of care that doesn’t always look like nurturing. Sometimes it looks like leaving. Sometimes it looks like refusing to perform either role cleanly. Sometimes it looks like listening while being interrupted.

I’m not looking to define what a “mother–artist” is. I’m not even sure the term serves us. But I am interested in those who dwell in this threshold—those who hold both states without letting either collapse into certainty. Those who build, pause, leave, return, and hold.

This is a practice of staying with the in-between, of making art from the gaps, from the unfinished, from the mess. It’s about creating space for voices that aren’t often invited into artistic discourse—not just biological mothers, but those who mother in other ways: friends, lovers, caregivers, artists who hold others through their work.

To mother is not always to care in expected ways.
To make art is not always to escape.
To mother–artist is to move through a space that resists clarity.

It is a practice of holding, not as possession—but as presence.
A holding of breath, of contradiction, of becoming.

And maybe that’s where the work is: not in naming a new role, but in attending to the liminal space that refuses to resolve.