ABSTRACT
This chapter is a personal account of my experience of motherhood and the ways in which this personal experience has shaped and informed my creative artistic practice. The personal hardship I underwent as a rst time mother is then consi dered through wider critical frameworks, as well as the personal context of reparative second time motherhood. The insights and critical understandings regarding my experience of motherhood, shaped and framed by social conventions and taboos, are the material from which I develop and create works of art. Some of the creative processes also operate as auto-therapy and oer a personal journey of coming to terms with my perceived failings as a new mother, but I maintain that the value of public exhibition of my work acts as a way of articulating forbidden aspects of maternal experience, expanding and diversifying contemporary maternal narratives.
