Elwes continued to use her body, as well as that
of her child, in videos made upon leaving art school during the 1980s.
The development of video technology enabled the artist to create
pieces in the private space of her home. Using her body, along with simple
devices and domestic found objects, she acted out various scenarios. In
1983 Elwes made With Child, which featured the artist heavily pregnant. In
this work she explored notions of time, ranging from anticipation of the
birth to feelings of boredom and destructiveness. It recalls the work of
American feminist artists, such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro's
Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts in the early
1970s. In Britain feminist artists were also exploring issues around their
bodies, motherhood and what it means to be a woman artist. For example,
Tina Keane and Shirley Cameron, as well as Mary Kelly, an American artist
living in London at the time, made works with their children. At the time
there were many feminist groups that one could belong to or be associated
with, for example the Women's Arts Alliance and the Women's Artists
Collective, an offshoot of the Artist's Union. Women art historians such
as Roszika Parker, Griselda Pollock and Lisa Tickner were also taking on
roles of activity and activism. Elwes was ensconced in these debates,
groups and activities.
Myth/There is a Myth (1984) was made after the birth of her child,
Bruno Muellbauer, and continues the theme of motherhood in her work. It
opens with typed statements telling the story of a woman who creates the
world and gives birth to a group of men; she is then killed by them
because they fear that if she can give life she can also take it away.
This text is intercut with a close-up image of a breast, which slowly
leaks drops of milk (strangely resembling tears) as an infant's hand grabs
and beats against it. The viewer eventually realizes that the infant is
feeding from the other breast, which is causing the one in view to
lactate. This is interspersed with images of the artist sucking on her own
thumb, suggestively cut against her clamping her teeth together. Text
appears intermittently saying 'GIVE LIFE' and then 'TAKE LIFE'. Indeed,
it is women's ability to create and nurture life that is juxtaposed
against the hint of a darker, violent impulse in the video.
Elwes' fellow artist Susan Hiller described this as her 'Kleinian
piece', referring to the work's debt to the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein,
who revolutionized psychoanalytic theory by asserting that the child's
development was centred around its relationship with the mother's body.
Klein's theories contrasted with that of her fellow Austrian Sigmund
Freud, whose notions of development were focussed on male sexual organs,
especially the presence or lack of the penis. For Klein the breast played
an ambivalent role in the child's psyche: providing nourishment and relief
from hunger, but containing the power to withhold vital resources. Elwes
has said that she wanted to create a positive image of the breast as an
object of nourishment. At the time she was taken aback by the taboo
against breastfeeding in public, which seemed nonsensical in relation to
the number of breasts on view at magazine stands at every newsagent in
Oxford, where she lived.
Images of breastfeeding and motherhood were taboo with some
left-leaning academics, who feared that reminders of reproductive
functions risked biological determinism, and thus, kept women in a
subservient status in culture. Elwes objected to the idea that a feminist
artist had to avoid depictions of the mother's body in the work of art.
The knife-edge of her work exists in trying to reconcile a celebratory
approach with an awareness of how such images were used in the past.
Finding an angle, a mother's or infant's eye view, was part of Elwes'
attempt to undermine established visual language while asserting women's
rights to their biology as well as their creativity.
