ABSTRACT
‘Life on Pause’ explores my experience as a mother and performance artist during the pandemic. In particular, I examine how the initial, sharp societal shutdown foreclosed the realisation of a project that explored lived embodied experience of the maternal and of (vicarious) mortality; that is of becoming a mother, and losing my mother to cancer. The project was paused by the intense pressure on material circumstances, something felt by many in caring roles. Upon restart, the project became recast by physical and psychic containment. A live art performance that involved grappling with a flushed pink, oozing material ‘flesh’, was reshaped for the camera. The context of the project also changed in the light of COVID-19, through which issues of care and mortality become heightened concepts. This chapter reflects on my experience as a mother-maker during the pandemic, and how circumstances threatened and then changed the mode of production of the project, as well as the cultural context in which it is read. The mother’s flesh, now transposed for the still and moving image, morphed into organs and organisms, through which maternal embodied experience is connected to a global sense of the precarious morality of individuals, and of humans as a species.
