Fattened flattened tongue ties: performing maternality online and offline

www.fattened.net contains a series of moving image, audio and text works, which reflect on how maternality is performed online and offline: researched, imaged, networked, fantasised, interrupted. By timing the conception, gestation and birth of two babies to form my doctoral research, I have used the project to stage my (m)othering body as an unstable working site at the intersection of institution, online/offline communities and artwork. Throughout, my hand has been attached to my iPhone, an extended bodily limb, connected to the Internet or in aeroplane mode. Taking up this subjective, intuitive and embodied position, I identify (m)otherhood in a digital, networked age, as an entangled condition, where the push and pull between online and offline space is amplified, where the (m)othering body is particularly “tied” to others and where a continual disruption of agency and articulacy is at play. The project organises a new configuration of performed maternality asking what constitutes maternal voice and how this can be “spoken” but also “heard” within a matrix of (m)otherhood that is tongue-tied, umbilically-tied, screen-tied, Internet connected, continuously switched on and charged.
“Fattened” and “flattened” are treated as terms of poetic value that articulate varying formations of weight in relation to bodies, spaces and generations. “Fattened” infers an expanded state of corporeality, one of buoyant pregnancy, full cream milk or overwhelming online experience. “Flattened” is thinning and tongue-tied; it connotes anxiety, loss or isolation, often experienced in the digital contemporary. In my research, these terms overlap and leak into one another, mirroring the equivocal maternal body whose limits are constantly breached and shifting. Fattening and flattening loop to follow my own shifting between pre-pregnant, pregnant and post-pregnant states, and a configuration of maternality that oscillates between the two: “becoming expert” recedes behind the operations and effects of layering, cutting, repeating, scrolling, searching and interrupting. Writing and filming through my own visceral corporeality, I research maternal leakage and kinship, relating a wet aesthetic to maternal womb space and the flow of data we experience virtually. In Scroll’s fictional texts and moving image works grouped under Stomach, I configure questions within this wetness around the politics and exchange of pregnant and breastfeeding bodies online, and what seeps out of them.
My research designates a space for a temporary loss of language for the (m)other, at the point of maternality, through a play on words from “mother tongue” to “(m)other tongue-tie”, drawing on my experience of mastitis from breastfeeding my tongue-tied baby during Maternity Leave. I orientate this research through three works in particular, grouped under Screen, which all navigate a maternal subject in varying states of “tongue-tie”. Central to this is Jude (2020), the portrait of a former Rebbetzin, (m)other and drummer and their exclusion from an Orthodox Jewish community as they come out as non-binary and acknowledge their sexuality, using technology, social media and the Internet as tools for exploring their performance of self and the construction of an alternative network of friends around their new identity. As one of those friends, and an active member of the Jewish community that Jude is excluded from, this work has a particular bearing on my own activity as a (m)other researching what it means to “speak” through tongue-tied maternality. It is the artworks themselves that become sites for speech production, speech that encompasses drumbeats, song and images, allowing a figuration of (poly)vocal maternality to emerge.

Keywords: artist research
flatten
breastfeeding
Ankyloglossia
online
screen
mastitis
pregnancy
website
maternality
mother
interruption
offline
(m)other
tongue-tie
fatten
Jewish mothers
doctoral research
video
performance
Advisor: Ess, E
Cussans, J
Sworn, C