Feral Mothers is a collaborative performance project by Helen Sargeant & Delpha Hudson. Together they create surreal juxtapositions between the maternal body, domestic objects and landscape that utilise the magic of encounter and the material symbolism of nature that aims to transcend domestic ‘bounds’ and promote care and equality.
Performing and writing domestic bodies in nature; narrative and Guattari’s 3 ecologies
History has mapped nature as a political space with visible boundaries. Escaping beyond the Romanticism that has shaped our preconceptions of nature and wildness, and the appropriation of landscape and nature part of social-political ordering as a socially construct or ‘scape’ (Foucault). The nature of landscape is that certain activities are excluded from particular spaces. Demolishing monstrous domestic enclosures and renewing our relationship with open outside spaces (even if it is over-determined, and historically ‘scaped), and exploring how to transcend the ‘bounds.’ Opening out space is part of a project to,
‘take up and transform the discourses that hold sway, to rearticulate rather than run from whatever has cultural potency..[and] develop and promote alternative visions’ Stacey Alaimo
In the politics of location, space, and place women have been victims of socio-spatial boundaries that confine them through care and domestic labour. Confinement is a recurring image in women’s lives. ‘Space surrounds us in imagination that we are not free to move beyond’ writes Marion young, who also writes of potential bodily boundary confusions for women for whom birthing as an extreme suspension of inner and outer ‘the inside things emerges between my legs, for a short while both inside and outside me.’
Discovering in nature a feminist space of possibility that is outside of typical (and is antithetical to) domestic values and enclosures has the potential to create ‘parodic subversive confrontations’ that destabilise and transfigure women’s historical association with nature. Performative actions are not static or passive connections to nature. Women have not been authorised subjects or ‘knowers’, through movement and action, women have the potential to find different ways of being and knowing.
Objects and actions associated with home simultaneously contradict and mock the notion of ‘wildness,’ creating a geographical desire and marginalised resistance to it that is differentiated and paradoxical (the coexistence of sameness and difference; of contrasts between nature and nurture). Performing domestic objects and tasks outside in natural settings at once conflates and negates women’s connections to home and nature.
Countering persistent mythologies through the ecology of the body is a paradoxical resistance. It dis-places domestic care, placing it outside ‘home’ and in alternative material environments addresses complex relationships between our bodies and ‘space’. The potential pluralism of narratives that face out whilst facing ‘in’, creates a complex web of new narratives that transform the stratified and confined Self and creates de-territorialised Others.
Working in local landscapes and nature is ‘expressive of specific cultural meanings’, it works with natural phenomenon that stand for something else. Different forms of knowledge are explored through aesthetic and metaphoric elements that incorporate nature in oblique and symbolic ways. Using narratives to make work that aims to create connectivity and ethical engagement, paintings, performance and film involves each of the 3 ecological concerns that Guattari speaks of: social ecology, mental ecology, environmental ecology.
Iron my Hair is a performance film by Helen Sargeant and Delpha Hudson that is performed at dusk at the Mên-an-Tol in Cornwall. We spent one day together at the site, with some random items, including a lampshade, an iron, a big piece of cloth, some children’s ironing boards, and a picnic. We’d never worked together before, but felt something magical happen. Three performance micro-films (or ‘sister films’ as we like to call them) that use material from improvised performances from that day ensued:
Chrysalis Iron my hair Ironing the sky
Iron my hair was shown at Who Cares ? curated by Hannah Bowles for Fringe Arts Bath Festival 2024
Conversations between Calderdale and Cornwall
Living at opposite ends of the UK, both Helen and Delpha have both been making art works about motherhood for over 20 years. Their current practice overlaps with other media, including paintings and drawings, in addition to performing together in local landscapes in both Calderdale and Cornwall. Care is the connective thread that runs through performative actions at significant sites. At the Bridestones in 2024 this included ironing pools, feeding rocks and swaddling stones. Together we make new myths and correspondences between caring acts and domestic symbolism – outside of domestic enclosures, claiming the mythical affirmation that ‘we are all mothers’; overcoming the over-determination and blanket silencing of the category ‘mother’ – and the word ‘care’.
Huge thanks to Helen Sargeant for playing and collaborating. More to come as Feral Mothers, Helen Sargeant and Delpha Hudson process new films, installations, drawings and texts. Find out more on our Instagram pages: