In this special issue of Studies in the Maternal, Kate Pullinger reviews Underbelly, which won the MaMSIE Digital Media Competition last year:

‘Underbelly’ is a highly original work that makes great use of the multimedia potential provided by computers. It blends text, sound effects, voiceover, archive drawings, and photographs to create a rich meditation on reproductive rights and dilemmas in both twenty-first century, and nineteenth century England.

I first met Christine Wilks when she was a student on a MA in Creative Writing and New Media that I helped run. She began working on ‘Underbelly’ for her MA thesis, and I’ve been fascinated to watch the work develop since that time. It was clear then that Christine was creating something extraordinary, an important work in the newly emerging field of digital fiction, one that shines a light on a little known part of the history of the mining industry, while illuminating a contemporary story of a woman artist at the same time.

Studies in the Maternal is an international, peer-reviewed, scholarly online journal. In addtition to the papers and reviews (listed below), this special issue also includes visual media art, on the theme of Maternal Subjectivities, Care and Labour, and Kate Pullinger writing about her novel, The Mistress of Nothing.

Papers:

• Stella Sandford What is Maternal Labour?
• Lucy Delap “For ever and ever”: Child-raising, domestic workers and emotional labour in twentieth century Britain
• Daniel Miller Getting THINGS Right: Mothers and Material Culture
• Rosie Cox Competitive mothering and delegated care: Class relationships in nanny and au pair employment
• Rachel Thomson Making motherhood work?

Reviews:

• Maria Papadima: Joan B Wolf, Is breast best?
• Laura Seymour: Rita Ann Higgins, Ireland is Changing Mother and Jackie Kay Fiere

MaMSIE* Study Day

Birkbeck, University of London, 20 May 2011

My playable media fiction, Underbelly, will be exhibited throughout the Study Day, which concludes with the presentation of the winners of the Digital Media Competition 2011: Maternal Subjectivities, Care and Labour - and I’m delighted to announce that Underbelly is the overall winner!

The other winners are:

• Marie-Josiane Agossou and Esther Jones for ‘The Order of Things‘, an 8 minute video
• Hester Jones, ‘Call Yourself a Mother’:  2 photos
• Hollie McNish – ‘Push Kick‘ audio poetry collection
• Marina Velez – two photographs, ‘My Family 1′ and ‘Strowis Motherhood’.

About the Study Day

MaMSIE is an international network of scholars, artists and activists working in the emerging interdisciplinary field of maternal studies. Our 6th event focuses on the interrelations between labour, capital, care and the maternal. In particular, it will consider the diverse ways ‘maternal care’ has been, and continues to be delegated and shared, and the implications for our understandings of maternal subjectivities and the labour of care.

The study day will open up ‘maternity’ as a term that includes the paid and unpaid work of a diverse range of social actors. It aims at generating a dialogue between two rich and substantial bodies of feminist scholarship; work on the social histories of domestic labour, service and servitude and current debates about globalism, migration and the care industries, recasting existing scholarship through the lens of maternal studies.

The Keynote speaker is Stella Sandford. Other speakers include: Rosie Cox, Lucy Delap, Alison Light, Mirca Madianou,Daniel Miller, Jenny Mitchell, Kate Pullinger, Rachel Thomson, Imogen Tyler, and Helen Wood.

Many thanks to the MaMSIE network and the organisers of both the Study Day and the Digital Media Competition. For more information see MaMSIE events.

*Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics

So much history is buried beneath our feet, and histories buried in other ways, by forgetfulness or disregard. If you live in a former mining area in Britain, that history is deep underground. Evidence of the coal mines have been erased from the landscape, swept away in less than a generation. Deeper still in the past there’s a buried history of women working underground too. When I found out about the women miners, I thought of my sister, the sculptor, Melanie Wilks, working on the site of a former colliery turned into parkland, hand-carving stone on the very ground above where those pasts are buried.

Such fragments of contemporary life and shards of history I hauled together to build Underbelly in digital media, collaging a rich and often grotesque mix of imagery, spoken word, video, animation and text. It’s an interactive story about a woman artist who, while sculpting on the site of a former Yorkshire colliery, is haunted by a medley of voices.

Melanie Wilks carving on site of former power station, picketed during 1984 Miners’ Strike

It includes video of my sister carving and the voices are performed by me. The historical content is drawn from the testimonies of 19th Century women miners collected by Lord Ashley’s Mines Commission of 1842, which exposed working conditions in the pits.

Sisters

My sister and I were raised in Morley, a Northern industrial town, whose prosperity in previous centuries was built on shoddy mills, coal mining and quarrying. Our family has lived in this area for generations and, although we both moved away, we found ourselves returning to Morley to live.

When we were growing up here, the place was black, black with soot from the mill chimneys and heavy industry. Pollution clings to carboniferous sandstone and almost everything, apart from the modern housing estates, was built from the local sandstone. It felt like the coal-black of the pits had risen above ground, as if the back-to-back houses, the chapels, the pubs, the civic buildings were built from coal. I even remember, as a baby, my sister used to like eating the stuff. We had coal fires, of course, and there was warmth, but I wanted to escape all that blackness and the weight of the Victorian heritage bearing down on us.

'The Miner' in Woodkirk Quarry where Melanie carved it in 2007

So it’s ironic that I ended up back in my old hometown, Melanie too, both of us creating artworks that are rooted in the locality, which Underbelly clearly is if not my other works. As for my sister, well, most of her creative output is located in the area. She carves it from the local sandstone, often working in the local quarry (where she met her husband, Neil, an ex-miner). She is quite literally a local artist. Whereas, in some sense, I’m not really present in Morley. I’m in my computer most of the time, in virtual space, roaming the internet, connecting, conversing and often collaborating with other people, geographically far away, in other countries.

And where does my work exist? It’s digital, conjured up out of code – just zeros and ones when you get down to it – it’s nowhere and anywhere and all over the place, scattered or drifting, packets of data being pulled and pushed in cyberspace. Whereas Melanie’s stone sculptures are unequivocally present, rock solid in a geographical location. We’re at opposite ends of the scale – sisters, so similar and yet so far apart in terms of the materials and processes we work with. But both of us, in our different ways, working with the past in the present.

Neo-Victorian Art and Aestheticism

'The Miner' being installed outside Morley Town Hall

Recently I gave a talk about Underbelly, and performed it too, for the Neo-Victorian Art and Aestheticism Conference at Hull University. My aim was to explore the connections between the digital fiction’s vernacular Victorian representations and its 21st Century sculptor, whose art practice is based on that of my sister, hand-carving in what could be viewed as a traditional and vernacular figurative style. It’s no coincidence that Melanie’s work is often commissioned by local communities in West Yorkshire to commemorate the passing of their traditional industries or, more particularly, the passing of those working lives. There’s a poignancy to the sculptures but they also evoke a strong sense of Neo-Victorian civic pride – for example, The Weaver and The Miner, two sculptures by Melanie sited in front of Morley’s grand 19th Century Town Hall.

The unveiling of 'The Weaver' outside Morley Town Hall, 2007

For my presentation, I tried to unearth some of the rich ironies, contradictions and correspondences between our almost diametrically opposed art forms, our experiences as working women, our uses of the past, and also how and where our artworks are situated in the (past)present. You can see the images I talked about and draw your own connections in my Underbelly Cabinet of Curios, which is a digital collection of some of the sources, influences and catalysts that gave rise to Underbelly. There’s also a peek at one stage of the process of writing and structuring the digital story. In another compartment of the ‘Cabinet’, I’ve collected some creative works by others that struck a chord with me in relation to the themes I explore in Underbelly. Speaking of which, here’s another…

Neo-Victorian Folk Song

Another instance of a vernacular Neo-Victorian aesthetic in a traditional artform, The Unthanks sing the testimony of a girl miner. I used some of Patience Kershaw’s testimony in Underbelly too.

Thanks to James Pope, one of the judges for the New Media Writing Prize 2010 (which was awarded to Underbelly) for drawing my attention to this moving Neo-Victorian folk song (originally by Frank Higgins) on The Unthanks album, Here’s The Tender Coming.

Screenshot of Underbelly

Underbelly ‘beta version’ launched today!

UPDATE: new version uploaded 26 March 2010

Underbelly is my latest playable media fiction that I created in Flash. I call it a playable fiction because you need to explore it with your mouse to find and play the many voices of the narrator. It’s about a woman sculptor, carving on the site of a former Yorkshire colliery, now landscaped into a country park. As she carves, she is disturbed by a medley of voices, along with her ticking biological clock, and the player/reader is plunged into an underworld of the artist’s repressed fears and desires mashed up with the disregarded histories of the 19th Century women who once worked underground mining coal.

Yesterday I performed Underbelly at the stimulating and wonderfully amplified Transliteracy Conference in Leicester at the new Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre. The conference was a rich mix of practitioners’ talks, academic papers and artists’ presentations. I was delighted to share an artists’ panel, classed as Transliterate Practice, with Michael J Maguire, who performed his experimental piece, cameltext, and Steve Gibson, who talked about his game-installation, Grand Theft Bicycle. (Later in the day I took a joy ride on his eponymous bicycle and caused a bit of havoc in game-art shooter land;) To get a flavour of our panel session, see the liveblog: Practice in Transliteracy – parallel session 2

Calling for Underbelly user testers

Taking my cue from another Transliteracy presentation, Kirsty McGill on Remote Audiences, I’d like to engage some remote user testing of Underbelly. As discussed in my panel’s session, one kind of transliterate practice is where an individual artist takes on a number of roles to create a multimedia digital work across what are traditionally considered different disciplines. This is certainly how I made Underbelly – I devised, wrote, designed, programmed, animated, image-edited, sound recorded/mixed and even performed the voices. One thing I didn’t do was carve the sculptures – that’s the work of my sister, Melanie Wilks. I relish working in multiple media on my own, independently, but one of the downsides is that I hardly have anyone around me to grab and say, ‘Hey, have a go at this, does it work for you?’ (other than my hard-pressed partner, Dane Gould, whom I can’t thank enough) and usability testing is essential for interactive pieces.

So I would be very grateful if, after playing with Underbelly, you would leave comments for me here about any bugs or issues you might find, or any improvements you’d like to see to the user interface. Comments on any other aspect of the work would be most welcome too. Cheers.

Here’s how Lisa Baraitser and Sigal Spigel describe the work in their editorial:

Christine Wilks’ wonderfully quirky interactive digital media work: Fitting the Pattern: or being a dressmaker’s daughter… is a memoir about her mother, a skilled dressmaker, whom Christine grew up with in Leeds. Christine makes use of biographical minutiae at their intersection with cultural representations for exploring the emergence of subjectivities within mother-daughter relations. The work invites the reader/viewer to take part in the exploration and mediated construction of perplexed yet intimate mother-daughter relationship.

About Studies in the Maternal

Studies in the Maternal is an international, peer-reviewed, scholarly online journal. It aims to provide a forum for contemporary critical debates on the maternal understood as lived experience, social location, political and scientific practice, economic and ethical challenge, a theoretical question, and a structural dimension in human relations, politics and ethics.

The e-journal publishes “articles, essays and reviews from academics, writers, artists and clinical and cultural practitioners who engage with the maternal from diverse perspectives,” including multimedia work that “falls outside of the textual tradition.”

Here are the contents of the current issue:

Conference of the Postgraduate Contemporary Women's Writing Network, 11-12 Sept 2009, at University of Oxford

A couple of days ago I presented, Underbelly, my most recent work of digital fiction (an almost finished work-in-progress) at the Writing Bodies/Reading Bodies conference in Oxford. Underbelly is about a woman sculptor carving a figure on the site of a former Yorkshire colliery now landscaped into a country park, but it also includes stories of the women miners who used to work underground in the 19th Century. As I said in my introduction, there’s a long association of the female body with the land, e.g. Mother Earth, but it’s perhaps little known that women used to work underground, hauling coal like beasts of burden. This history is largely forgotten, almost erased apart from a few websites (see below), and now the colliery sites themselves have been erased from the landscape too.

National Coal Board Collection: Portrait of a Miner 2 disc set from BFI

So it’s with great interest that, on my return from the Writing Bodies conference, I read in the Guardian that the British Film Institute is launching a ‘major restrospective of its extraordinary archive of mining films.’ In his article, Pitmen at the pictures, playwright Lee Hall makes a similar point about the effacement of our working class history:

As soon as the pits started closing all evidence of their existence was erased. I remember driving around the Durham coalfield trying to find locations for the movie of Billy Elliot, desperate to get a glimpse of an archetypal winding gear, and shocked to find they’d all been knocked down. Similarly the industry seems to have been Photoshopped out of the national imagination as if the working classes didn’t exist any more – as if all that labour history was an embarrassment to the consensus of all the major parties, who now see us as consumers rather than producers.

Thankfully Photoshop is just as good for montage as it is for airbrushing out and I have used it for Underbelly to put women miners back into the picture in an interactive collage of imagery and voices from my imagination and historical sources. I’ll be publishing the piece, created in Flash, on crissxross.net fairly soon.

For more about the history of pitwomen see A Web of English History: The Peel Web or A Modern History Sourcebook: Women Miners in the English Coal Pits or Women in World History Curriculum: The Coal Mines, Industrial Revolution

Kate Pullinger's 'Line of Influence' at Binary Katwalk

Binarykatwalk is an online exhibition space for experimental digital work, curated by locative media/new media artist and writer, Jeremy Hight, and this month sees the launch of the Kate Pullinger section of The Line of Influence, which is:

…a series of a few artists selected to show their work alongside who influenced them and those they see as kindred spirits coming up. This is not an ordinary exhibition, but instead a chance to show how ideas and works progress over time and how no artist is a solitary force out there.

I’m honoured that Kate has chosen to include my own piece, Fitting the Pattern, alongside Flight Paths, the networked novel she co-creates with Chris Joseph, These Waves of Girls by Caitlin Fisher and Renee Turner’s She….

Fitting the Pattern in the Binary Katwalk open-gallery-network

remixed for R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX from: classy joint + Toni Lebusque + recycling bellini

My friend Toni Lebusque is an artist who makes images with pen and pastels as well as digital media and lately she’s been inscribing her wonderful drawings into her flesh. I’ve never been tempted to get a tattoo myself, I’m far too variable, but I can relate to that desire to embody, to embolden the body, to flesh out, to be art in the flesh. It feels somehow connected, although diametrically different, to what draws me in much of my creative work – bringing viscera and flesh into the virtual, see: rawVamp, rawLorem Ipsum, IntraVenus or couplings.

So what do I do? I turn Toni’s tattoos electronic. Well, there’s no ‘arm in it, is there? (sorry;-)

flash source for remixing: bananarma_CS3.fla or bananarma_fla8.fla

IntraVenus

Female Icons: it’s not the gaze but the looks is a fascinating project by De Geuzen: a foundation for multi-visual research, that explores what makes a woman an icon through a rich variety of means, including workshops, streaming lectures, online data collecting and new media works on view such as She… by Renee Turner and my own IntraVenus.

In December 2007 Renee interviewed me about IntraVenus for the Female Icons archive. I reproduce it here:

The Interview

Renee Turner: Can you give me a little background on IntraVenus, meaning what your impetus was to make the work?

Christine Wilks: I created the images some time ago when I was a young art student. At the time I felt somewhat overwhelmed by the predominance of the female nude throughout art history and felt the pressure of this archetypal image (exacerbated by being taught by an almost entirely male staff) was interfering with my ability to visualise myself as a practising artist. I wanted to explore this, to get inside the image and challenge it directly with my own body. I was quite surprised when the images turned out to look so violent, the way my body looked so battered and bruised. It was disturbing, but all the more fitting since my self-image as an artist was bruised.

from IntraVenus

I ended up with a whole load of 35mm transparencies which I filmed on a 16mm rostrum camera and added a kind of abstract sound track – but I was never entirely happy with this version. I’d reduced myself to an image and hadn’t even given myself a voice. So after showing the work a few times on tour with some other women film-makers, the work languished unseen – or to quote the work itself, IntraVenus laid fallow for many years.

Then in 2004, thanks to getting involved with the trAce online writing centre, I started to create rich media for the web. After many years of going down creative cul-de-sacs or veering off on detours, this finally felt like the perfect arena for me as an artist. Rooting around in some boxes one day, I found the 35mm slides and decided to scan them into my computer. I realised I was finally ready and able to write the soundtrack/voice-over that the images needed.

RT: As a projection, you chose Titian’s Venus of Urbino, why that particular Venus above all others from art history?

Titian's Venus

CW: I was attracted to her – her fishlike softness, her gaze, the way her hand rests in her crotch, the two women in the background looking in the chest (what are they looking for?). Plus, on a practical level, I found I could fit my body into hers the best. I tried many other images – Manet’s Olympia, Ingre’s Grande Odalisque, Boucher’s Nude on a Sofa, etc. – but Titian’s Venus was the best fit…!

RT: The Muse is on the one hand passive, a classical female nude who is the recipient of the gaze and on the other, without the muse, creativity cannot take place.   In myth and art history, she is actually the one who ignites the creative process.   Can you talk about the some of the contradictions of the Muse as an archetypal female figure within the creative arts?     (I imagine this question will bring up the fact that you’re a woman making art…  and yet art historically, women could inspire but not create.)

CW: Personally, I don’t know whether the idea of the muse is very helpful. Usually I don’t feel the need to personify the source of my creativity, but in this instance, with the repurposing of the images for IntraVenus, it helped me out of an impasse. I wanted to address my situation as a female artist who, in the past, felt she had lost her way and succumbed to unproductive periods, times when it would seem her muse had deserted her… if you believe in that kind of thing… Well, I certainly didn’t then and I didn’t spend my time hanging around, waiting for the muse to strike. But, crucially, I didn’t believe in myself as an artist either. I neglected that vital core of my being. Ironically, it was by tackling head-on the archetypal idea of the female muse that restored me as an artist.

IntraVenus is about taking creative responsibility. As an artist, one must choose one’s own muse. If you choose a damaging muse, a muse that silences you, that batters your creative ego, then it’s going to be a long and difficult struggle – which it was for me… until now. Now I feel free of the dodgy muse that wants to silence me.

Whether your muse, if you need one, is male or female, depends on how the fancy takes you.

RT: Can you discuss the use of projection in the piece and how that works symbolically?

CW: ‘According to Corey Mixon, projection is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one “projects” one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings onto someone else.’ [quote from: Psychological Projection, wikipedia.org]

There’s a strong connection between projecting an image and the concept of psychological projection. I project the object of art, in this case the female nude, the object of the male gaze, onto myself, the subject, the artist. I become both subject and object. It’s my subjective view but  it’s complicated because I’ve internalised the objectification of the female body in art and it projects back onto me, doing me visual ‘damage’, interfering with my ability as a female artist to picture myself – both to represent myself visually as unequivocally and sexually female, and to psychologically picture myself as an artist. My internal self-image as an artist becomes distorted and damaged, which inhibits my creativity. For me, psychologically, the only way out of this is to face it and struggle with it, to challenge it, to do battle with the demons. So I project onto myself what I most fear – passivity, being unable to act, being unable to create as an artist – and in the act of doing this, I am creating. It’s the way out.

Ada and one of many networks of women today

remixed for R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX from: maschinenmensch + la cicciolisa + Wikimedia Commons File:Ada Lovelace 1838.jpg + Wikimedia Commons File:Babbage difference engine drawing.gif

flash source: adalovelacedayCS3.fla (206kb)