Cirrus@Austlit

'This article examines maternal representation in the Drawings of artist Mary Leunig, positioning her work as a form of activism. Images offer collective and unspoken knowledge, and have a vast capacity to infiltrate perceptions. Recognising the power of the visual to convey narratives that challenge the established culturally dominant ideologies, I argue that Leunig visually reveals the damaging gaps between mothering, and motherhood as institution. For over three decades, her published drawings have confronted normative and accepted representations of mothering and motherhood. Her drawings represent her personal experience as a mother and also the influence of motherhood as an institution upon her experience of mothering. Leunig's drawings and their stories identify the lack of a matrifocal society, one within which, as Miriam Johnson put it in Strong Mothers, Weak Wives, mothering could be "a role that is culturally elaborated and valued." I identify themes that relate to Leunig's maternal experiences, and also the arguments of scholars critical of the domestic status quo who question mothering's traditional representations, in which women are asexual, natural caregivers. Leunig's drawings vividly show her preoccupation with the high price paid by mothers for domestic accountability, bearing responsibility for the work of care and, significantly, the emotional price also of the maternal relationship. Her drawings visualise mothers as both martyrs and the surviving heroes of a war-amidst chaotic domesticity and a family life in a deep separation from the world outside. Leunig has a difficult story and visualises difficult stories, exposing herself and baring all-her art epitomises the term "blood and guts," signifying vigour, violence or fierceness. Her visceral style may alienate some audiences but, I suggest, perceived transgression is both necessary to and emblematic of feminist history, and it also demonstrates her activism. Leunig's five books challenge an embedded view of mothering, exhibiting publicly the essential outrage that, in the feminist movement, has been instrumental to social revolution and transformational change.' (Publication abstract)