Hannah Murgatroyd - Resistance is Held in the Body
A Review
“Entering middle age for a woman is often a vanishing, which is reflected as a dead zone in a female artist’s career, outside of societies key markers: you’re not young and hot, you’re not a grandmother, and you’re not dead.”
Hannah Murgatroyd’s paintings sit like goliaths in the TCHC Viewing Room. Curated by Greg Rook, the paintings, large and small, are lit from above and hang with ample space around them. Each swollen-bellied figure is afforded the attention they require. Every one a fresco of creative expression and genetic time.
This is an exhibition about creation and space. The show sprang from a period of monumental change for Murgatroyd. The artist became pregnant later in life and she gave birth just before the Covid-19 lockdown. From a space of empty work time arose a creative change that Murgatroyd had been searching for. All the rules and routines of life had been broken, leaving a fertile void. This coincided with another societal gap, that of the middle-aged woman. ‘Entering middle age for a woman is often a vanishing, which is reflected as a dead zone for a female artist’s career, outside of societies key markers: you’re not young and hot, you’re not a grandmother, and you’re not dead.’ There was no expectation which allowed Murgatroyd to break down her creative boundaries. For the first time she felt she was constructing a multi-faceted thing, something that could be pulled apart, something she understood the bones of. ‘Before I just felt like I was making pictures, now I am creating paintings.’
Being a full-time mother has fundamentally altered the way she paints. She works in snatches of grabbed time, using the things immediately available to her. ‘I emerged out of the fugue of early motherhood and lockdown and looked around at what I had: a brush, paint, and myself, so I started to bring myself into the work.’ Because most of her time is spent mothering, the beginning of most paintings is done in her head or drawing on her phone late at night. When she gets into the studio there is an explosion: a fast physical exodus of creative action. She does not create in one sitting, some of the paintings gestating and acquiring layers over a number of years. Each of the pieces are dissections of time, the layers revealing the strata of process.
These semi-self-portraits (for Murgatroyd’s form is a vessel for meaning), reflect the rawness of her life. The hair is white to reflect the artist’s age, the gaze points resolutely outwards to encompass her creative power. Although all the women have swollen bellies, the paintings for Resistance were made over the last few years, throughout mothering a young child. ‘I don’t think in linear time. When I was pregnant, I painted women with flat stomachs. Now I have a young child, painting pregnant bodies happened instinctively.’ During pregnancy, Murgatroyd experienced a deep cellular change. ‘When women become pregnant, their body absorbs the genetics of the embryo. I now genetically contain my husband within me through my child. His family history is now part of me.’ The rawness and depth of these works are an expression of these new histories, the layering of paint mirroring the new depths of the self.
Pregnancy and motherhood have encouraged Murgatroyd to investigate how her body is a pamphlet of history. ‘I didn’t expect to become a mother at my age. My body is a 20th century body, and I gave birth deep into the 21st century. I was born in the 1970s: a time which was a culmination in a number of social failures. The 21st century world was built on the ruin of the 20th. We have built shiny architectures on top, yet the mother continues: sitting on the rubble of what is around her.’
Resistance examines this position of the enduring mother. Murgatroyd considers her a kind of hero figure, standing on her own, trudging forth. No matter how much the world tries to render her obsolete, as the way in which we can mother continues to be squashed into smaller spaces, she continues to be necessary. The object of the palette is an ironic patriarchal critique. It is the symbol of male artist genius, so the figures in Murgatroyd’s work carry them as a reclamation, making us consider why one kind of creation has been historically lauded and the other – the creation of life – rendered commonplace. In these paintings, the mother is swollen with both types of creation, symbolising that she can contain multitudes all at once, all the time.
Resistance is Held in the Body runs from the 4th April – 4th June at The TCHC Viewing Room Gallery, GU34 3YU. Viewing is by appointment. There is a walk through with Murgatroyd and curator Greg Rook on the 19th April, 11am – 2pm.
