Blog #3 The Lonely Palette Episode 51- Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document

 Blog #3 

The Lonely Palette Episode 51- Mary Kelly’s PostPartum Document 

This episode of The Lonely Palette continues the series regarding motherhood and talks about Mary Kelly’s piece, Post-Partum Document, from 1973-1979. I have only heard about this piece, but I’ve never analyzed it in-depth or considered how it relates to other feminist art. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I had never really thought about motherhood and how it sometimes excludes artists from conversations regarding feminism and art as a whole. Podcast host Tamar Avishai talks about her reactions to first learning about this piece in her college art history class. She didn’t understand why Mary Kelly would make a piece about her son, while other feminist artists from her time were making work about feminine liberation and rejection of domesticity.

Art history is no stranger to depictions of mother and child, dating back to Renaissance or biblical art that always depicted Madonna and child. But what about the grueling, terrifying, confusing, and overwhelming experience of motherhood that people don’t talk about or see? In Mary Kelly’s, Post-Partum Document, she dedicates the first five years of her child’s life to documenting and recording as much as she can about him and how she felt at each stage of development. From the dirty diapers to his first scribbles, Mary Kelly shows it all.

This piece is divided into six different sections that correspond to her son’s development, starting as a newborn baby to five years old. She ends every section with a question. The first section is on feeding “What have I done wrong?”; the second section is on speech development, “Why don’t I understand?”; the third section is on markings on scribbles, “Why is he like that?”; the fourth section on transitional objects “What do you want?”; and the fifth section, “What will I do?” (Avishai 25:00, 2022). Although her experience with motherhood and her son is so personal and unique to her only, these questions address a larger population of anyone who has experienced motherhood or can empathize with it in their own way. 

Many feminist artists make work about the liberation of the feminine body, and many feminists, intentionally or not exclude mothers from the conversation. I think a lot of us are taught to reject motherhood and see it as a submission to domesticity that can be forced upon us. But what about the people who genuinely wanted to have children? What about people who had children but didn’t want them? What about people who don’t identify with their feminine body, or as a woman, but still have children? What about the sexualization of breastfeeding? What about the expectations of people after they have children, when those expectations are never applied to fathers? This topic applies to so many people, and as feminists, we should include anyone and everyone affected by it. Mary Kelly’s work was first seen as “anti-feminist” but I see it as anything but that.