How Motherhood Shows Up In Art: Ginny Casey and Megan Mulrooney In Conversation
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Strange vases and pots, constricted figures with bodily qualities, vivid colours alongside fleshy pastels: all properties of New York-based painter Ginny Casey’s work, in full voice at her current solo show Opposite of Hollow, at LA’s Megan Mulrooney Gallery.
To walk around the exhibition is to be surrounded by paintings of tactile vessels, and an overwhelming sense of heavy femininity – these images wear voluptuousness and weariness in equal measure.
To discuss the show, plus the presence of motherhood in art, and the need for some lightness and vividness in visual media right now, we brought gallerist Megan Mulrooney together with Ginny, for a special conversation – read more below.
Megan Mulrooney: Hi Ginny, I’m really excited to talk to you about this. It’s obviously something that is consistently on my mind about how motherhood affects women working, painting, doing anything. I was talking about this subject with someone and they said: “The periods of most growth during adulthood are related to three events in your life: partnership or marriage, or some kind of commitment to another person; another is having a child; and then the third is the death of a parent.” For you, motherhood is such a growth period, so I wondered if you connected to that at all?
Ginny Casey: Yeah I do relate to that, though in my my life things were already shifting when I became pregnant: I had plans to have a solo show in Brooklyn, and it was in a really vibrant artist-run space. It’s no longer there, but it was an important moment. It was the first time my work was seen by an audience beyond my own peer group. I titled the show Ghost Maker, and when I was making those paintings I became pregnant and I feel like that put some extra pressure on the work, to have it be really solid.
Do you think that the work you were making before you were pregnant was notably different to the work you made after you became pregnant?
Even the idea that I might be responsible for another human being put this weird pressure that I hadn’t had before. There were the same visual elements as was in my previous work but it got a lot more clarity with the Ghost Maker show. I feel like as with everything to do with parenting, it made me a little bolder, because I’ve had to be more decisive and hold boundaries more firmly. Thankfully the same has happened with my paintings. Using invented frameworks (like an imaginary ceramics studio as subject matter) and even with colour, simplifying and making many preparatory studies to ensure that I had clarity before beginning on a larger piece and wasn’t being wasteful as best I could.
I connect to that because when I had my son four years ago, everything shifted. Your whole selfhood shifts. I know there’s a lot of vessels in your work, and vessels are linked to motherhood or holding something – another human or a child. Do you relate to your forms as these stand ins for being a mother since they’re tied to that in our understanding?
Yeah, especially because I’d done a lot of bulbous forms, but I started doing the pitcher specifically, and then I became pregnant around that time. So I felt very much like the pregnant vessel was me. I also relate the larger figure and smaller figures to a relationship between parent and child. Now obviously I’m working and I’m not pregnant and I have a six year old and a nine year old so it’s shifting, but I still feel drawn to that idea of the vessel.
Even in your particular work The Filling Station which is currently on view at the gallery, you’ve been incorporating human forms. There’s a human form sitting on top of this container or jug, which almost has this form of holding some kind of liquid because it’s being poured into a tap into three tiny vessels, and we talked about that as a passing down of knowledge.
Lately I’ve been thinking more about “What am I passing down to my kids?” And there’s things I’m confused about that I never clarified for myself, or that I was taught as a kid. It brings back memories of your own childhood. In reaction to a childhood coloured by a bit too much certainty around religion, I see “spirituality” with a sense of vagueness as a gift. I want to give my kids something more open-ended, but I’m curious: what is it that I am actually passing down? I’m going through figuring that out now. It’s messy. No parent knows all, we just do the best we can.
I think about the evolution of your work from when we first started working together from seven years ago to now – something I’m always thinking about with your work is the colour. This is the first exhibition where I believe it’s so vibrant and you’re playing with colour more. I don’t know if that relates to your personal life, but I think a lot of what you’re talking about is that your work is uniquely personal.
I made a shift towards brighter colours in this body of work. These past couple years were weighing heavy, and my work got even darker than it already was. And I was like, “I want to play with colour again. I want that to be a source of joy and play.” I want there to be an element of exploring and bringing it back to the optimism of experimentation, and colour can be that for me. It was psychologically helpful for me to attack that as a goal.
I think that’s a trend! Given the weight of us as political bodies or in this social-political climate we’re in, artists are turning to work as a source of joy and hope. Someone said to me the other day is that “The reason people collect art is because they’re investing in the future” – the future of humanity, of artists. If we are in some sort of crisis with collecting, maybe it’s because people don’t have the hope for the future that they once did. And I think with artists being able to shift colour within their work, to have it be this hopeful piece that we’re missing, maybe that can give us some kind of solace.
It won’t bring world peace, but for my own sanity I try to surprise myself in the studio - whether it’s with brighter new colour combinations or weird little uncanny visual jokes.
Do your kids find your work fun?
No. They’re never going to be my intended audience. They want brighter colours, more flowers. That’s what I hear from my daughter. But my son’s drawings when he was like, four, were the perfect starting points for paintings. He had only abstract abilities and had beautiful knobbly lines that unexpectedly shifted between thick and thin. When I’d give him a piece of charcoal and a giant piece of paper, he just went crazy. I used many of his drawings a couple of years ago!
I think that you being a woman and a mother is very important for the work, for me. You are your own self but you also can’t separate it. This idea that your kids aren’t your intended audience, but they’re everywhere in the work, and you being feminine is everywhere in the work.
The work is about something about me, truly.
There’s a lot of solitude in being an artist – do you find it lonely, or because you have your family, it’s not?
I’m easily overstimulated after a long day in the studio, so the natural limitations that come with having little kids and the way that it shrinks your focus works out OK. It used to be more lonely before I had kids despite the fact that I would go out more.
Are there any meditative qualities within making work?
When I’m painting and I’m blocking in colours, there’s a state of extreme joy that can happen, when the colour starts to come together. It’s fleeting, but that feeling is something I’m always chasing after, that moment.
Ginny Casey: Opposite of Hollow shows at Megan Mulrooney Gallery until 1st November.