Doing Nothing

An intimate series about care produced in Bonn, Germany with London-based photographer Grace Gelder

“The words that mothers repeat in this kind of conversation are ‘not doing anything’ or ‘getting nothing done’ or ‘doing nothing’. This is how they keep describing their experience. We need to listen carefully and to ask ourselves what ‘doing nothing’ means. I used to assume that it meant the absence of ‘doing something’. But listening to what mothers say, it sounds as though doing nothing is an experience in itself.”

–Naomi Stadlen, What Mothers Do

This photo series is as much about the visible as the invisible. Because its origins are in the run-up to The Paris Agreement, (read more about that journey here), the daily life in it is really yoked to the commitment we as a family made over those two years, to be a part of the make-shift community in Bonn that popped-up around the United Nations and specifically in the Altstadt, the northern urban neighbourhood we were based in. In short, what you see in this photo series is one node of a huge network of invisible labour that was essential to the drafting of the Paris Agreement.

Dr. Alexandra Sacks has termed the coin Matresence to describe the transition to motherhood. Culturally, we have hugely imprecise language to describe the transition to motherhood. Social media magnifies our cultural idealisation of motherhood, the pharmaceutical industry contributes to pathologizing many of the anxieties surrounding motherhood, and we have all participated, wittingly or unwittingly, in belittling the institution of motherhood itself. But motherhood is not a carefully curated experience, its shadows cannot be medicated, and its social status needs to be faced with political courage. In other words, the richness of the motherhood experience needs to be seen alongside the grief, the loss of identity, the uncertainty and the hardship. The scope of our visual and our written language are still far too small to describe a human experience this is at the core of every life. It’s my sincere hope that this project gives other mothers a broader lens through which to view family life, and a richer language with which to talk about it.

Doing Nothing is archived at Goldsmith University Women’s Art Library (London), has been presented at University of Cumbria’s Visualising the Home conference (UK), images from the series were shown at Conway Hall’s exhibition When Women Gather (UK), co-curated by Grace Gelder and Marianne Mulvey (London). A handprinted limited edition photo book is due out July 2020.