Cristy Gilbert and Anna Simic, Sunny Side Up, Performance Installation 2013

Making Tracks Exhibition, Alumni ANU Sculpture Department

Motherhood is a transformative experience. Beyond obvious physical transformations, women embarking upon motherhood undergo psychological, practical and existential transformation. The experience simultaneously encompasses brave adventure and mundane existence. Identity shifts. Often the role of Mother, at least for a time, eclipsing previous formative markers.

Gilbert and Simic subvert normative depictions of motherhood by embracing wholeness. Corresponding to the feminine dichotomy of Madonna or whore, representations of Mother regularly feature perfection or dysfunction, triumph or destruction, competence or chaos. In Gilbert and Simic’s satirical fashion Sunny Side Up presents a caricature based upon the mid-20th century housewife that steadily unravels as the pair undertake a series of abstracted yet menial domestic activities conducted to a seemingly arbitrary schedule within a constructed domestic sphere.

The performance opens with a ritual cleansing. Simic, poised and preened, moves purposely through the space ringing a feng shui bell. Enter the melody from Strawberry Fields Forever, combined with overwhelmingly buttermilk frocks and hairspray as accent to the almost clinical space, providing a Stepford Wives undertone. The discord in authenticity is immediate but the audience must travel with the duo through physical, psychological and emotional realms to arrive at a true appreciation of the contrivance.

Performing duties listed on a scroll, Gilbert and Simic enact a ritualistic series of tasks that increasingly rupture the pristine domestic space they inhabit. Between the periodic insistent ringing produced by ‘baby’ egg timers marking the passing of time in an otherwise circuitous environment, the pair remove flecks of dust, fold, crack eggs, produce baking ingredients and scrub floors. Initially these tasks appear to possess narrative intent, but as the sequence progresses it gradually reveals an unraveling of the clinical image of domesticity the pair have created.

Gilbert cracks an egg, and then abandons it to search for another. Suddenly Simic ruptures this familiar sphere of female endeavor, searching under her skirts to release a hidden bag of sugar. She walks through the space leaving traces of her passing as sugar leaks from between her legs, conjuring thoughts of amniotic fluid or urine. Gilbert jumps in with purposeful scrubbing, perhaps to remove traces of the other woman’s saccharine sweetness. As Gilbert succeeds in partially controlling and reshaping the trace of the other woman’s presence she stands up purposeful once more only to have Simic enter the space and violently throw down a slab of butter upon the floor in defiant ownership of her own unfettered traces, her action screams ‘I got this’.

A bag of flour is released from beneath Gilbert’s skirts. The comic delivery of the flour happily punctuates the serious overtones often ascribed to motherhood and domestic duties, although the nervous audience twittering accompanying its delivery reveals the cultural taboo still associated with what lies beneath women’s skirts and female sexuality. Linked to the advent of agriculture and the cradle of civilization flour is an ancient symbol of human nourishment, its appearance here perhaps signifying the birth of nurturing woman as Mother only further adds to the unraveling of the mythological domestic goddess as it creates mess and discord within the space. Indeed, for each new element ‘birthed’ into the space the control and chaos are exponentially inverse.

Simic moves in rapidly to take control of Gilbert’s delivery, gently shaping and molding the flour into a form she is happy with, before proceeding to mix it with the eggs Gilbert has been preparing, altering it’s very essence. A game of power relations has begun to appear between the two women who we initially identified as equals. Gilbert progressively rails at the tasks and the futility while Simic ‘leans in’ [1]and gets tough, seemingly supportive of Gilbert in their joint endeavours but only so long as Gilbert’s efforts serve her own objectives. Meanwhile, a bell chimes. Another task. Another bell, the picture further unravels. The list is checked another task and another bell.

Gilbert’s heavily expectant state influences the performance, imbuing her actions with authenticity – fatigue, irritation, surrender and detachment. Her physical experience of the event embodies the common conflicts of motherhood. Simic’s presence as performance of the feminine and domesticity contrast with Gilbert’s authentic emotive and physical presence as Mother. Gilbert is publicly undergoing the very transformation she is exploring.

As fatigue, both physical and emotional, begin to press heavily upon the scene Gilbert turns toward a bed of plastic containers covered with cling wrap sheets. She attempts to rest. Tossing, turning, attempting to find a comfortable posture, Gilbert’s disturbed attempts at sleep further disrupt the domestic space. This tension hints at the conflict enveloping all new mothers, to sleep or attempt some semblance of domestic maintenance, a state in which sleep becomes contested ground, necessity become guilty pleasure. The phrase ‘you’ve made your bed, now lie in it’ springs to mind.

Gilbert and Simic’s construction and deconstruction of domesticity and motherhood along with the incumbent societal and personal expectations captures the many tensions contemporary mothers encounter. Pressure to embody a fantastical construction of the feminine ideal when faced with an overwhelmingly corporeal reality imbued with repetition and the mundane presents as a maelstrom of emotional conflict. At the same time the two women often seem to be working at counter purposes.

This tension may be a commentary upon schooled competitiveness between women and girls that can undermine support and cooperation. In the final scenes a string of bags is being hung up like laundry and I wonder if I spy a noose at the end of the string. Gilbert begins screeching in frustration, Simic throwing her a line until Gilbert exits. The exit reads as a defeat but as Simic is left to manage the chaos of the reality they have created I cannot help but wonder if victory is Gilbert’s as she rejects the constructs of femininity. Whilst Simic maintains her control throughout the performance the impersonal mask of perfection she dons in the closing minutes reveals a shell maintained to her detriment as internal dysfunction surfaces.

Gilbert and Simic’s journey into the maelstrom reveals the depth of Mother as psychologically contested space. Here we can mock the overtly sanitized feminine shell and laugh with the deeply disturbed inner turmoil that is Mother.

[1]Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook COO), Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will To Lead, Alfred A Knopf, 2013

*Addendum* Cristy Gilbert and Anna Simic have been producing performance as installation artworks together since the late 1990s. The duo, originally hailing from Canberra, have more recently been based in Melbourne.Historically their work has focused on competition between women, however according to Gilbert Sunny Side Up differs in its conceptual origin. The two women in Sunny Side Up were envisaged as a single woman inhabiting different phases of the mothering journey, or alternatively at least as two women with a shared and supportive experience rather than the competitive one they have traditionally explored. Interestingly, I managed a competitive reading of the performance. Whether this reflects an internalized competitive state in the female psyche or a ghosting of Gilbert and Simic’s former interactions it was interesting to learn that this was overtly not the intent of this piece.Image courtesy of the artists.

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