We were lucky to catch up with Aimee Koran recently and have shared our conversation below.
Aimee, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
My work is a meditation on love, memory, and transitions of time. Channeled through the lens of motherhood, my primary artistic concerns are with the personal and collective stories that shape our everyday lives and often go overlooked. Working across the mediums of sculpture, photography, and mixed-media installation, my practice questions how the images, issues, and objects closely associated with motherhood inform the social-political structure of the care economy. In the process, personal possessions – some mass produced, some handed down, and some handmade – synonymous with pregnancy, infanthood, and parenting are transformed. Through slight formal manipulations of scale, color, or material, I question how memories are easily shifted, as refuse now performs as a relic.
My practice highlights both the tension and the tenderness that materializes between mother and child through archiving the abstraction and sentimentality of the everyday.
Familiarly mundane moments of daily routines, baby clothes that have long been outgrown, and abandoned stuffed animals become stand-ins for the accumulation of time and labor spent over years of caretaking. By focusing on the physical vestiges of motherhood I viscerally relate the abstract structure of care and the unpredictable nature of time to its visible remains. This is made evident in my “Milkscape” series, which I started in 2016. Made by pouring a small amount of my breast milk onto a sheet of glass (the first instance of this stemming from an accidental spill after laborious pumping), the milk dries in abstract shapes, highlighting an otherwise invisible labor. The glass is then photographed, and the image is printed large-scale by a company that fabricates billboards. Scale is crucial here. An intimate yet highly labored and nuanced exchange transforms into a sublime moment of viewing, suggesting how personal space becomes blurred or even nonexistent as a mother. Applying the traditional format and sizing of a flag to these images allows for a moment to pause, admire and celebrate this labor. Art is inherently political and can be used as a tool to make a statement. I use my Milkscapes series as a way to expose the process of lactation. An intimate yet highly labored and nuanced exchange transforms into a sublime moment of viewing, suggesting how personal space becomes blurred or even nonexistent as a mother. My breast milk is the invisible player in a secret dialogue between mother and child—as feminist writer Hélène Cixous says in her essay The Laugh of the Medusa, “She writes in white ink.” By exposing the process of lactation, these Milkscapes illuminate one way in which the female body is called on to perform and to produce. An otherwise private exchange between two bodies is revealed, highlighting the fragility of our right to privacy, and illuminates the many ways in which the female body is called on to perform and to produce. Breast/chestfeeding is all the things, but it should always be one’s choice. People do or don’t breastfeed for varying reasons that are unique to them. Real autonomy comes with the ability for people to choose what’s best for them and their families.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My voice as an artist is inseparable from my identity as a Philadelphian and as a mother, both integral to my practice, informing and inspiring my work in every context. I live in the house that my grandparents lived in, the house where my mother was raised. I live on the same block that I grew up on. My daughter and son both go to the same elementary school that both my mother and I attended. Philadelphia is integral to my lineage, and my family is deeply rooted here.
Being both a mother and a maker is significant to my living heritage and profoundly informs my practice. My grandmothers spent the earlier parts of their lives working in textile factories here in Philadelphia. Inspired by my lineage of makers and mothers I find comfort in the term “women’s work.” Historically, domestic handiwork, both craft and content, has been devalued—the term itself has often been employed to depreciate the significance or social value of such work.
Formally, my work is situated at the intersections of feminist art, “women’s work,” craft, and abstraction. Merging mediums and materials together, I am constantly shifting my process by learning new techniques. I utilize materials that are often dictated by my access to them. More specifically, I’m drawn to the objects and images summoning childcare, motherhood, and feminized labor, and some that originate from my body, like making beads out of my dried breast milk. Obligations of mothering and the never-ending disorientation that come from the role dictate time allotted for making or impose the space for working (like on the floor leaning up against a crib). My work often exists in the nuance of familiar moments, between the detailed intimacy of personal narrative and the ubiquitous banality of care taking to inform my work. Similar to most mothers and caretakers, my time is often dictated by the needs of my children. The reality for an artist who is also a mother is that opportunities for privacy, and focused work are fleeting moments, a few hours here and there, minutes between naps and mealtimes.
Motherhood and the culture of care economy is now more visible than ever, both in and outside of the art world. The pandemic has exposed issues that are long overlooked but deeply rooted in the evolution of feminist art. From the structure of care that has mostly been dictated by men but performed by women, to the importance of paid family leave, to addressing the inequities of maternal care that significantly impacts Philadelphia’s Black mothers, the culture of care is getting more airtime than ever—and yet little positive structural change has occurred. I thus see the significance of my work not only artistically but perhaps more importantly socially and politically. To use the words of Judy Chicago, spoken in Artforum in 1974, “What has prevented women from being really great artists is the fact that we have been unable to transform our circumstances into our subject matter…. to use them to reveal the whole nature of the human condition.” This is changing, but there is still much more work to be done.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
My commitment to and passion for making this work emerges from the birth of my first child, my daughter Maya, which happened three months before starting my MFA program. I found myself in the throes of the fourth trimester while being a new mother, new student, and making new work. Having the capacity to create and nourish a life was profound. The experience of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood changed me: feeling empowered in a new way, wanting to scream from the rooftops, “Look what I did!” Against the dismissive attitudes towards mothering as a subject within contemporary art, I began to explore these experiences in my graduate program studio practice. At the time, the immediate and overwhelming response to my work was a resounding “NO.” This response–disinterested at best, and often negative and derogatory at worst– continued after graduation into the ‘art world’. While the criticism and lack of support was shocking at times, it wasn’t surprising. Given the patriarchal structure of our society, motherhood and caretaking is often devalued, spoken about through a language of tropes and cliches and often trivialized and made to feel unimportant. Yet we’ve all been born, an experience germane to each and every one of us. Through my practice, I not only recognize but honor this shared human experience, using motherhood as a motivation for making. These are my monuments to motherhood.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
Designing Motherhood, The Mother Artist, Mothernism, Of Woman Born, The Mother of All Questions, Matrescence, How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers, The Republic of Motherhood, Birth Strike, Mothers as the Makers of Death, The Laugh of Medusa, to name just a few!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.aimeekoran.com
- Instagram: @aimeekoran
