Double Void 2001

Short Summary of Double Void

A durational performance of walking a circle dragging a red hessian bag full of lard that corresponded to the weight of Delpha’s youngest child. This action was juxtaposed with 3 monitors of performances made over several days at Newlyn Gallery, 2001, and a previous film of the action Burden (1998). Examining time, change and transformation and the ‘void’ of motherhood (Lucy Lippard).

You can now read more about this performance, installation and film project in The International Journal of performance arts and digital media, Volume 21, 2025 Issue 1: Matrescence & Media edited by Laura Bissell, Jodie Hawkes & Elena Marchevska. Double Void, Time, Trauma and Matrescence explores this multi-media performance work in relation to matrescence (the time of ‘mother becoming’). Or carry on reading….

Abstract Double Void, Time, Trauma and Matrescence

My personal story is a significant part of a story that now at 60 (and a ‘good enough’ grandma), I feel more than ever is about time and trauma. In re-visiting past performance and media art works that I made in the early noughties with a matrescent lens I explore the continual process of becoming mother as a process of Self that can never be finalized.

I made maternal performance-media works from 1998 with the aim of making visible lived experiences of motherhood because I didn’t see ‘real,’ if any representations of motherhood around me. Re-visiting my performance and media installations of the 90s within the context of matrescence is a belated activity. Looking at Double Void 2001 in detail and its use of live performance juxtaposed with time-based film, I continue to explore the unfolding trauma and return in which mothers adapt to motherhood, I continue conversations with past selves, past theory and research and multiply time frames (and the gaps between) to explore and amplify the ever-changing landscape of ‘becoming mother’.

Double Void, Time, Trauma and Matrescence

By Delpha Hudson

‘Re-vision  –  the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman far more than a chapter in cultural history, it is an act of survival.’ (1)

Prologue: one act that leads to another

In the late ‘90s, as a mother of 4, I returned to university to study fine art. I was in my mid-30s and still recalibrating, defogging and re-conditioning my brain after 30 years of being a Mormon. I had only experienced 5 years of thinking beyond this defining and controlling patriarchal religion and the over-arching definition of women as homemakers and mothers.

I had married at 20 and by the age of 25 had 3 children under 5. At 30, I Ieft the church and my husband in what I now understand to be a bid for personal survival. I could no longer claim to be a ‘good enough’ mother and certainly not ‘ideal’ mother; I was a ‘bad’ mother yet prepared to live with the label because I was an ‘alive’ mother. (2)

I embraced a new life and a new way of thinking and then accidentally became pregnant. I deferred a year of art college to embrace the pregnancy and named my child Phoenix. I hoped together we would rise from the ashes of an ignominious start and that as a single mother I might rise above cultures of control and balme and be a ‘good enough’ mother.

Matrescence, art and media

My personal story is a significant part of the story I am going to tell here, about art, matresence and media, that now at 60, and a ‘good enough’ grandma, I feel more than ever is about time and trauma. In re-visiting and re-visioning past performance and media artworks made in the early noughties with a matrescent lens, I explore the ‘physical, psychological, and emotional changes experienced during the significant transformation that is motherhood’ over an extended time period. Long after the initial mothering stage of physically bearing children and caring for them into adulthood, every stage of a woman’s life (including becoming grandmother) is a process of fluid change and adaptation. The continual process of ‘becoming mother’ can never be finalized. It is often in the gaps between linear time frames that it is possible to find ways to represent mothering and share affective knowledge and experience of the process of ‘ becoming mother’ that is so often hindered by sequential expectations as well as cultural baggage.

I made maternal performance-media works from 1998 with the aim of making visible  lived experiences of motherhood because I didn’t see real, if any, representations of motherhood around me. Re-visiting my performance and media installations of the ‘90s within the context of a theory of matrescence now, is a belated activity. I had never read Dana Raphael’s book Being female: Reproduction, power and change but I knew that mothering was not innate. It was a role, a masquerade, and a way of being that was learnt and appropriated. This theory of ‘a time of mother-becoming’, expanded on by Daniel Stern, suggests that giving birth to a new identity can be as demanding as physically giving birth to a baby. Stages encompass ambivalence, reality, feeling not good enough, reflecting on one’s own experiences of being mothered, and new stresses in family dynamics. These stages seem to refer to and are limited to the initial years of mothering with the assumption that women adapt and succeed in being ‘good enough’ mothers. I am sure I am not alone in feeling that ‘becoming mother’ is an ever present and continual journey, no matter what stage of life one is experiencing and that there is no final destination.

My archival work Double Void 2001 with its overlapping time frames aimed to explore the unfolding trauma and return in which mothers adapt to motherhood in the context of the exigencies of bodily experience, the physical bodily weight of care and the psychological burden placed on women by societal expectations. Here, I continue conversations with past selves, multiply time frames and the gaps in-between in order to explore and amplify the ever-changing landscape and process of ‘becoming mother’.

Double void 1998-2001

‘The central concept or action is to durationally walking a circle and dragging a bag of lard whose weight corresponds with the weight of a child. Changing as the child grows, this action is a metaphor for the physical, psychological and cultural burden of childbearing and rearing that women are expected to bear.’ (Delpha Hudson, 2001)

In 1998 I asked a filmmaker friend Paul Ward to film me dragging a sack of lard that corresponded to the weight of my, then, 18 month old child (40lbs) around a chalk circle (approx. 1.8 metres across) in an abandoned warehouse in Birmingham. I walked the circle 10 times, and as I had no childcare my son Phoenix followed me around the circle and became part of the performance. To the resulting short film Burden, (3 minutes), was added a looped soundtrack of his first word which co-incidentally was ‘bag’.

The simple action of walking a circle dragging a red hessian sack was intended as a symbol of the 10 months or moon cycles of the pregnant body. I felt it was significant that it was an active representation of mother, from noun to a verb: walking and bearing the weight of a red hessian sack as a literal reference to the experience of the pregnant body with the additional metaphors for the psychological burdens of expectation, guilt and responsibility that mothers bear. 

It was always my intention that the performance would be re-enacted in different sites and settings and that the active duration of walking and dragging would grow indexically with the growth of my youngest child. As the size and weight of the red hessian sack and its contents grew, so would the physical and psychological strength required to drag it. At Newlyn Art Gallery in 2001 I was given the opportunity to re-create, re-enact and layer the simple act of dragging a sack of lard around a circle. Double Void was created as a time-based installation and performance that juxtaposed the performance film Burden (1998) with live and mediated film performances. (3)

Double Void, video film still Newlyn Art Gallery, 2001: projection of a negativized film version of Burden onto stacked lard.

The title Double Void was inspired by Lucy Lippard’s ‘curious void’ of representations of motherhood and procreativity, (4) referring not only to the absence of representation of motherhood but to the problematic nature of representing presence of a female body and Subject. I hoped to enunciate multiple voids and

visually create relationships in-between lived experience of motherhood at different stages of a mother’s life by juxtaposing a continual loop of live presence and time-based film.

Performing presence and disappearance

‘Women’s specifities, their corporeality and subjectivities, are not inherently resistant to representation or depiction. They may be unrepresentable in a culture in which the masculine can represent others only as versions of itself, where the masculine relies on the subordination of the feminine, but this is not logically or biologically fixed. It can be redefined, reconceived, re-inscribed in ways entirely different from those that mark it today’.(5)

Inspired by my reading, I wanted to make art that might ‘re-inscribe’ the mother’s body and play with ways that the experience of mothering might be ‘representable’. I had already been making live performances juxtaposed with time-based films to explore possibilities for differentiated representations of fluid identities over time, (6) and it seemed significant to utilise the language of the body as a powerful symbolic form and to re-inscribe it as

‘an open-ended pliable set of significations capable of being rewritten, reconstituted in quite other terms than those which mark it’.(7)

Using the potential of the body and its physical presence to communicate experience as a

‘reflexive process of embodiment that enables the subject to turn history onto itself and explore and interrogate its terrain.’ (8)

Yet I was also anxious that perhaps the live body as primary material only achieved a representational status and as a ‘substitution’ did not deliver ‘truth,’ (9) that successive and ‘identical confrontations’ of live acts might somehow cancel each other out, thus posing questions of ‘presence and its disappearance’. (10)

These doubts about how it might be possible to experience live and embodied acts led me to explore spaces in-between live and mediated acts through time-based films. I hoped that in the resulting gaps or spaces between media itmight be possible to enunciate and represent multiple subject positions over time; evoking the space of continual process, change and adaptation of ‘becoming’. (11)

Somewhere between performance and time-based film

Double Void juxtaposed live performance with film (12) to emphasise aspects of ‘real’ time and its contrapunctual index. Time is always in flux, continually ‘becoming’, and always changing. It proposed that it is the slippage between the permeable interpretive time frames of live presence and its ‘disappearance’ that might represent an unfinalizable space in-between and evoke a mother’s life as never static and always moving.

In this space there is a

‘suspension’ between the ‘real’ physical matter of the performance body and the psychic experience of what is to be embodied.’ (13)

In 2001 the act of walking the circle in the gallery space was performed live and filmed repeatedly. Each iteration recorded in different frames, contexts, light conditions, etc. became a process in which the repeated act represented multiple temporalities. During the day 3 screens showing these films were juxtaposed with durational live performances (14), and during an evening event film footage of Burden (1998) was projected onto my body as it performed the act of dragging the sack around the circle, thus layering and re-structuring the performance event again and again. This echoed ideas from Hal Foster’s notion of ‘return’, and his theory of diachronic and synchronic time in which deferred action and ‘retro-action’ produce a significance of event and the potential of ‘presence’ through ‘a complex relay of anticipation and reconstruction.’ (15)

Double-Void, digital film still of performance and film installation, Newlyn Art Gallery, 2001

Projecting the Burden film on to my body as it performed the ‘retro-active’ repetitive act of walking the circle aimed to embody this continuous ‘deferment’. Using the anchor of the live act and its mediated ‘echoes’ aimed to create an aggregate of time through temporary layers and overlap. This dissonance of time-space and resulting paradox evoked a potentially endless dialogue between reality and absence, aiming to evoke an interstitial space in which the mother’s body might assert a differentiated presence.

In this space there is a kind of inter-subjective immediacy and anteriority, a fluid interchange between different selves at different times, a negotiation of  different Selves that I felt had the potential to evoke a re-inscription of meaning for the maternal body/Subject who

‘falls into an unrepresented zone, with woman’s identity somewhere between less-than-one and becoming more-than-one’. (16)

Aiming to create possibilities for representing the mother’s body and mothering by exploring alternative spacesin-between presence and absence was part of a project in which I wanted to find places where the mother might exist, be present and ‘representable’. The mother Subject is a problematic notion in cultural discourses based on philosophical and psychological theories of a single unitary male subject. Double Void aimed to make the mother and her experience visible through the disruption of chronological time and hoped to create a language of multiplicity for mothers. Finding a language to enunciate my experiences of motherhood was also lifeline to my mental health at that time. (17)

A personal interlude…

As a mother of young children, I felt invisible, like I didn’t exist. This is a common experience for mothers who spend every waking moment with their children and so have no time for themselves, especially if they have no childcare, family support or friendship groups. I felt subsumed and desperate.

This sense of nonentity and non-existence was exacerbated by a strange timelessness: night and day became one as sleep was often interrupted or impossible; the children grew but you didn’t really notice; time measured in meals, appointments and repetitious acts of care but always interminable and seemingly endless. I now understand better this ‘senselessness’ of time in relation to my own mental health.

There was a popular TV ad for a woman’s product in the 80s that featured a woman drying her hair with a hairdryer. It buzzed and the hair moved, then the film went into extreme slow-motion. Time seemed to stand still. That ad still haunts me now as a visual evocation of how at certain times in a woman’s life, time does indeed seem to stop. There’s horror and fascination in the hollowness that many women experience especially in the act of mothering. They are so often caught in a web of an eternal daily round in which they are contained, fixed and pinned. Time is the enemy and there is never enough time for everything – let alone taking care of oneself. Understanding the patterns and transactions we are locked into takes time and perspective, and in looking back at mothering now I have more understanding and sympathy for my former selves.

I find my historical experiences of motherhood andbecoming motherstill relevant to me now. I am still coming to terms with my experiences, and I am now proud that as a young mother of three children in my 20s that I was a loving capable mother. It wasn’t just a role, a masquerade, I felt good at it and loved it. When my world crashed around me and I could no longer bear the physical and psychological pressures of being a Mormon mother with all of its hyper-ideality, I survived by becoming someone else and distancing myself from the person and mother I had been.

When I became a mother again in my mid-30s I was able to adapt the role of mother on my own terms and balance my needs with those of my child. I really loved being a mother then because I wrote and created the role myself and no-one told me what the script was. I had friends who supported me and becoming motherbecame an experience formed from time, knowledge of and an understanding of ambivalence and burden. In naming these things I could live with them.

I was, and am still angry about inequalities of care, responsibility and blame, yet the extra perspectives gifted by time enable me to process my inability to play the role of ‘good mother’ and forgive myself for my failures.

Families and gallery audiences were invited to join in and interact with the circle or talk about their experiences (photo by artist)

Matrescence, time and trauma

Traumatic events can be ‘intimated, allusively encountered, never mastered, and not fully seen’. (18)

Trauma as a ‘symbolic discourse that uses at source inarticulate and ir-representable sites of unprocessed anxiety’ (19) is often expressed in dramatic and cathartic ways. Yet in dealing with often ordinary, everyday and domestic minutiae, it is hard to articulate trauma in relation to women’s experiences of mothering because their experiences, if acknowledged at all, are dismissed as inconsequential. So often the traumatic aspects of ‘becoming mother’ are not spoken of, shared or presented. Ways in which mothers might verbalise or represent the source of their anxieties and difficulties are impossible to represent affectively. The presumption that mothering is ‘natural’, ‘happy’ and ‘normal’ is part of a devious historical psychology in which mothers often experience trauma yet are required to pretend otherwise.

For Hal Foster trauma is ‘recoded retroactively’, its ‘deferred’ nature means that it can be only realised and measurable after the fact. Whilst juxtaposing different time frames within Double Void with its gaps of time in-between, I could never have imagined, that I would come to understand it as a catharsis of my own trauma of becoming mother.

Looking back at Double Void and other archival performance works I continue to reflect on the contexts and time frames in which they were made. In the intervening spaces and gaps I confer different meanings, and processing and sharing my experiences gives me profound relief from the trauma I experienced.  In the same way that relational performance and media can create dialogues through and of time, using strategies of re-versioning and ‘return’ are essential for maintaining good mental health. Becoming mother is on-going and unfinalizable; I remain a ‘workshop of possibilities’ in which ‘echo and feedback loops’ create patterns of repetition in which the

 ‘self-emerges [in] a relational dynamic between past, present and future.’ (20)

Intimating personal experience through time and repetition creates movement between idealisation and lived reality that is affective and creates an empathetic ‘participatory responsiveness, …and reciprocal co-affectivity,’(21) and in sharing our personal experiences with others we are bearing witness or as Bracha-Ettinger states wit(h)-ness(22) to the experience of ‘becoming mother’.

Bracha-Ettinger also suggests that it is through ‘metramorphic’(23) processes and formations that reference our personal legacies of sexual difference and loss of self, that we might transform the burdens that we share. Rupturing existing modes of representation by creating relational processes that speak of continual transformation and change. 

Although not a stable opposition, reproductions of an ‘original’ event create a process of dialectical movement between site and non-site, and it was always intended that there would be re-sited versions of Double Void that would create further layers in-between time that corresponded to the process of growth and change of my child, and of myself as mother. Additional walking the circle with a sack performances were proposed but never made. (24) Instead, over time I have performed other projects and acts of catharsis that have dealt with the trauma of becoming mother. (25)

Belatedness, Return, beyond the ‘void’

‘Time perspective enables us to contextualise, historicise and categorise work that has been ‘completed’ and represented…..work grows, develops and aggregates in-between time frames, the ideas become more ‘real’ than that which they purport to represent’.

Looking back on this sentence from my BA dissertation written in 2000, I invite you to remember, or imagine, a time when there were no ‘mother artists’ or much scholarly writing about ‘maternal performance’. In the late ‘90s and early noughties I hunted high and low for performance artists who specifically made work about motherhood and for my MA dissertation ‘The State of the Maternal’ (2003) I wrote about Bobby Baker, Catherine Elwes, and Aine Phillips. It is hard to imagine now, with the incredible explosion of ‘mother art’ and writing about maternal art, but then it felt that I was indeed working in a ‘void’, the very thing I was making work about. In what felt like a vacuum, I collected anything I could that might support the creation of new ways of enunciating and representing the experiences of mothers. Some of those ideas and research are outlined here. (26)

Sadlyit is beyond the scope of this writing to fully explore all the potential relationships that might now exist between my archive work and current maternal art scholarship. (27) Belatedly exploring my personal experiences and performance practice, it is interesting to read of the potential of performance that explores motherhood as “embodied, relational and durational”  (Underwood-Lee and Simic, Maternal Performance, 2021) because Double Void used some of these strategies. It explored differing temporalities through durational performance that featured physical acts of endurance as metaphor for mothers whose work is often repetitive, boring and exhausting. ‘Duration’ is also a fitting term for invoking time and its after-effects that can be created by juxtaposing many layers of live performance and its documentation.

It is incredible now to see contemporary work by artists making work about mothering and parenting now, and the ‘void’ being filled with much needed representations of motherhood and I look forward to continuing dialogues between historical maternal works and contemporary art. (28) Matrescence is a useful concept in exploring ever-changing processes in which women continually adapt and change to the exigencies of motherhood throughout their lives. In a similar way it also has the potential to create dialogue between time frames and multiple discourses to find ways to make these experiences ‘representable’.  These are ever-changing landscapes in which we process our experiences and over time are able to understand and share them, for ourselves and for others.

Throughout our lives we constantly revisit the burdens and psychology required to ‘become mother’ in cultural landscapes that still isolates the mother from others and herself, that might deny her practical support and respect, subjectivity, and Selfhood. Looking back, I was especially bad at being able to ask for help to share the burden. Performing metaphors of weight and carrying, the materials and media I used intentionally carried symbolic dualities. I also thought of live performance and its documentation as a kind of visual and aesthetic ‘positionality’ relating to ‘discursive positioning’,(29) that creates movement between body, time, site and metaphor in constant re-constructions that relationally re-present the experience of mothering. Moving fluidly between historical and temporal time frames creates spaces and conversations between doing and the thing done, and with the potential of creating ‘discursive public spheres,’ in which people articulate established positions and have the potential to not only change them, but actually ‘come into being though dialogical interactions with others’. (30)

It is through exploring and reconstructing the past in relationship to the present that we ‘come into being’. ‘Becoming mother’ is not just the physical exigencies of childbirth and its shocking physical strains and residues that sometimes affect health in later years, or coming to terms with the residues of trauma experienced in the face of guilt, failure, responsibility, and societal expectation, it is understanding the continual and unfinalizable process of becoming all the people we are, including mother. Sharing our traumas and day-to-day experiences of becoming mother is significant in overcoming invisibility, isolation and filling the ‘void’.

I still sometimes think there is a finale, a different iteration of Double Void that continues the interplay between the time frames of maternal art and life. One of my favourite ideas was that I circumnavigate a local island (St Michael’s Mount) by boat 4 times, then for each of my 4 children I drop a ceramic figurine into the sea. Yet this would seem like a gesture of closure and would be a lie. There is never a sense that the job of mothering is complete, or that the process of becoming mother is over.

End notes & works cited

• Adrienne Rich in Pollock, G., Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspective, 2006  p.194
• I had embraced motherhood and loved it until the lack of sleep, guilt and pressure decimated any sense I had of self and I suffered what I know now was probably a breakdown.
• with help and support from curator Blair Todd from Newlyn Gallery
• Lucy Lippard in Warr, T.& A Jones, The Artist’s Body,  2000, p.254
• Betterton, R., ed), An Intimate Distance: women artists and the body, 1996, p.17
• Something Special, sculpture, film and performance installation, 1999-2001
• Florence P, & Reynolds D., Feminist Subjects, multi-media Cultural Methodology, 1995, p.197
• Diamond, Erin, Performance pedagogy, 2000, pp5&6
• Amelia Jones whose ‘Presence in absentia’ in Body Art, Performing the Subject, 1998, proposes live work should not be privileged over documentation

• Daniel Buren in Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art, Performance, Place and Documentation 2000, p. 125

• I use ‘becoming’ in reference to Christine Battersby who in Phenomenal Woman – Feminist Metaphysics and the patterns of identity (1998) writes of the ways in which women have a specific relationship to open ended pliable physical and psychological changes.

•  Nowadays everyone conflates video with ‘film’ but until recently were labelled specifically as different media. I use both terms interchangeably now.

• Peggy Phelan, Unmarked the politics of performance, 1993 p.198

• ‘durational performance’ itself means made over time. Historically durational performance art was often performance as a feat of physical strength over many hours or days. I walked the circle for an hour at regular intervals whilst the show was in the gallery.

• Foster, H., Return of the Real, 1999, introduction (p. xii)

• Battersby, C., Phenomenal Woman – Feminist Metaphysics and the patterns of identity, 1998, p19

• My optimism about successfully juggling part-time jobs, childcare and my art practice often became somewhat jaded. I had to work at least twice as hard as artists who didn’t have family and financial responsibilities.

• Pollock, G., After-Affects/After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum, 2013, p. 7

• Pollock, G., After-Affects/After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum, 2013, p. 12

• Battersby, Phenomenal Woman – Feminist Metaphysics and the patterns of identity, 1998, p.174.

• Pollock, G., 2013, After-Affects/After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum, p. 12

• Bracha- Ettinger in Pollock, G., After-Affects/After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum, 2013, p.15

• from metra =mother, and morphology= change

• I proposed Outside Circumference to Tate St Ives in 2007in the hope that I could physically drag a much heavier sack on the sand at Porthmeor Beach in front of the gallery but instead I was commissioned to make Miss-Readings a performance piece made at the Barbara Hepworth that explored motherhood in relation to her practice. Then because I was getting older and weaker, and the weight of my son so much physically heavier, the metaphor began to be problematic. There was an adapted live performance of Double-Burden made forLeyden Gallery, 2017 that did not re-enact the dragging of a sack, although there was a heavy suitcase, a lard baby and humorous personal story telling.

• Theatre of the Self (2017-2021) performatively dealt with diary writing and mental health issues surrounding mothering experiences. Like a ship righting itself, (2020), a film dealing with motherhood traumas and story telling for mental health. Most recently Skirting the Issues at SOAK Live Art Plymouth (2023) used short stories to explore traumatic domestic issues.

• More ‘mother works’ are to be found on my archive: www.delphahudson.co.uk

• As an artist with no academic affiliation I am currently finding ways to access more contemporary research including: The M Word (Chernick/Klein), Reconciling Art and Mothering (Buller), Mothering performance: maternal action ( eds Lena Šimić, Emily Underwood-Lee), Motherhood and Creative Practice (Marchevska/Walkerdine).
• An incredible example of this is Acts of Creation curated by Hettie Judah

• Rosi Braidotti’s term in Patterns of Dissonance, 1991 that seems to echo and relate to Elizabeth Grosz’s term discursive positioning in Volatile Bodies:Towards a Corporeal Feminism, 1994

• Pollock G., After-Affects/After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum, 2013, p.240

Double-Void, film still, evening performance and film installation, Newlyn Art Gallery, 200. As soon as it was dark enough the negativized film version of Burden 1998 could be projected onto the artist who repeated the same action of walking the circle, multiplying representations of presence and creating a dialogue with time – something that this archive continues to do.

Look at or read about other mother performances.