Collective art making
A home studio with children
Soon after becoming a mother, I searched for other artists who were also mothers. I can’t tell how that search began or how I realized I needed to establish a formal connection between my early experiences with motherhood and my art-making. This coming week, we will have a birthday party for Helena and Ulysses, who will be six and three years old, officially taking our family out of babyhood.
Over this time, I have felt that most of the conversation about motherhood and art-making revolves around the early mothering experiences, much of it centered on the impossibility of making art while caring for a baby. In my own early days as a mother with Helena, I found help with Lenka Clayton’s project "An Artist Residency in Motherhood", and did two (or three?) rounds of six-month mentorship with her. I was interested in how Lenka phrased that she wasn’t doing work “about motherhood, but out of it.” To me, Lenka’s perspective offered the possibility of framing the activities already happening in my life as art, shifting the value one gives to actions of care.
As I step out of babyhood completely, with Ulysses completing three years old, and as I continue to explore the idea of making art with, I notice, however, that the conceptual weight of Lenka’s Artist Residency in Motherhood is very different from what I have been pursuing. My long-term project is relational and based on the curiosity of what each person brings to the making. In other words, I have been learning with and making with each mark, decision, and creation that each of my children does, looking to incorporate their actions and personalities into my art-making.
The Faccion Grodzki Studio
This leads me to reflect on the construction of my professional life as an artist. When I married Marcin, I changed my name and replaced my father’s name with Marcin’s last name. The name change contradicted my feminist perspectives to favor a childhood memory: I loved that my mother had the same last name as my siblings and me before my parents divorced. Somehow, the fact that we had the same long (in Brazil we add the mother and the father’s last names, so my name used to be Debora Faccion e Ferreira Pinto) last name meant to me that the children and the mother formed a unit. I wished then to have this unit with my (future) children, and decided to change my name.
After seven years of marriage, the name change is still an ongoing bureaucratic nightmare that hopefully I’ll manage to fix within one year. However, as my home studio practice continues to evolve with the children, I feel grateful for that move. Having a home studio that we titled as Faccion Grodzki Studio has meant that we are continuously finding ways to work with each other, and that, for as long as Helena and Ulysses wish to, they can participate in the making of this work.
I realize that I started this section of the text with a phrase that introduced the reflection of my “professional life as an artist” and then wrote about my family experiences instead. This is a contradiction that I’ve been working through personally. When I look back at my life, I like to think that I was always an artist. I look for the moments in which I was interested in visual art, when I made things to sell, when I entered art school, and the academic research I developed, always looking for ways to form myself as an artist. Throughout this path that I walked with enough intentionality and a heavy dosage of seriousness before having children, I understood art-making as an almost entirely abstract action, focusing mainly on the conceptual premises of art. Going through pregnancy and bringing my children along to make art with me shifted my professional stance on how and what I hope to accomplish with art-making: I see my actions becoming more concrete and evident in the material world; these last years I was focused on the types of paint, on the textures and potentials of textiles as surfaces for paint, on the spaces where we can make and exhibit art, on the physical positions we adopt for painting, and finally on the shapes and visual vocabulary we create.
This week, I only stepped into the studio and painted in moments that Ulysses and Helena asked me to paint. Sometimes, their desire to paint is stronger than their desire to go out or play on the tablet, which shows the impact of these shared moments on our lives. This morning, Ulysses did a series of circles with watercolor on paper while telling us a story of people playing around volcanoes. The circles were the movements of their bodies as they ran around the craters and jumped from one mountain to another. The final painting was just lava erupting. Over these years, I’ve had countless moments of painting like this one, and my intention is to document more of them here through my website, to help me consolidate the collective making of our Faccion Grodzki Studio.
Similarly, Helena drew on her arm this morning, and I decided to take pictures of it. Helena has a deeply inspiring artist soul, and she is wildly creative. She is also extremely photogenic, with an iconic aura. It is a privilege to take pictures of her, so I want to share more of these here, too, as part of my effort towards the vision of our shared home studio.
