Inside-Out | Desperate Artwives Takeover Leyden Gallery

Join us on Saturday 30th June 6.30-9.30pm for a night of Performance and inter-art-action.

.... including belly dancing and biscuit eating, among others... with Sharon Reeves, Christina Vasileiou, Susan B Merrick, Barbara Touati-Evans, Katy Howe, Ema Mano Epps, Jenny Cahill, Laura Fooks, Raquel Macartney.

Desperate Artwives with Leyden Gallery will continuously look to reflect upon and tease out these important and frequently dismissed conversations, giving voice to these concerns with a feminist commitment. Mothering (smothering) it's your most important role! It stretches you in all directions…. It pulls you inside out.

Motherhood is often based on ambivalent feelings, happiness, depression, overwhelming pressure and exhaustion, intense love, mind-numbing boredom. Becoming a mother can leave a woman with ambivalent feelings towards motherhood as she is forced to come to terms with complex emotions very quickly, often in extreme circumstances, and often in isolation.

We are peddled a perfect, unattainable image of motherhood, in advertising and media of all descriptions, but it is common to feel angry, sad, overwhelmed, insecure, and more, and we find ourselves questioning whether we should be feeling these emotions at all. The most powerful proponent of these unrealistic expectations is organised religion, forming the backbone of most cultures worldwide and giving us the “Idealised Mother”. No one can live up to it, but we all continue to try... and if we don’t, or when the realities of being a mother leave us with feelings of guilt, can this guilt be used constructively? Is it possible to love your children but hate the auspice of motherhood? Inside-Out refers to the internal experience and conflict.

Desperate Artwives artists will pull apart these experiences of internal conflict and will articulate them, with courage, through performance art and live action.