Catherine McCormack

In Latin, the word ‘mother’ (‘mater’), comes from the same root of the word as ‘matter’ and ‘material’. To be of a mother then is to be part of the material fabric of the world.

It might be useful to return to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing here and his suggestion that the female nude in art history displays: ‘her nakedness not [as] a function of her sexuality, but of the sexuality of those who have access to the picture’. In other words, her sexuality is relative to an implied owner.

there may be those who want to possess her, or those who want to emulate her, but what does this say to those who see nothing of their desires in her? And how does the woman spectator of these bodies separate her own desire and sexuality from the archetype that has been modelled for her – especially when it is one that is to be understood in relation to an owner?

Hair is considered sexually attractive on women’s heads, but ugly and ‘unfeminine’ when on their bodies. But body hair emerges at a woman’s sexual maturity, so, like menstruation, it speaks of burgeoning sexual maturity, and reproductive ability, but archetypal images of Venus tell us that the sexually mature female body needs to be stripped of any evidence of its hormonal readiness to reproduce. And so our patriarchal Venus hands women an inescapable paradox: that they should be sexually available yet ashamed of the things that signal their sexually mature bodies. From her motherless birth to her hairless bloodlessness to her passive objectification, what Venus images seem to symbolise is the suppression of women’s real sexuality.

In her book A Burst of Light (1988), written after her diagnosis with cancer for a second time, Audre Lorde wrote about the power of self-care as a radical act of resistance. ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence,’ she wrote. ‘It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare

Before it was a sealed spring and enclosed garden, the maternal body was a boundless and incomprehensible force not made in the service of God – it was God.

symbol is the one now known as omega in the Greek alphabet – a symbol that now signifies endings but once symbolised the open uterus, the flowing in and out of life and death.

Birth – the opening of one body to produce another, the moment when consciousness and identity potentially start – is the common denominator in the experience of all those living. Yet as a topic for serious art it has been consistently eclipsed by other compelling aspects of the human condition, such as sex, death and war. Birth has been made to seem too horrendous, taboo and obscene to contemplate. It is the antithesis of the hortus conclusus; it is the opening at force of the spring, the urgent rush of the fountain.

Perhaps this was because God is represented as an ethnic woman and not a white man. Or because the birthing body might call to mind a two-headed monster, something to fear. Perhaps because we might think birth is private and not for public consumption. Perhaps we think of the physical act of birth as something painful and disempowering, so to see God giving birth would undermine our notions of what a powerful god is.

Like Morisot’s women, her presence is uncertain; she is someone who is half seen even to me, someone who I don’t have any pictures of.