Infocus: with art curator Amelia Wallin
Image by Jessica Prescott
“Practice repair. Motherhood feels like a continuous breaking apart and coming together, equal parts painful and joyful.”
Amelia Wallin is not your typical mum. Mother to Otto 9 and Rune 2 her life in conjunction to motherhood, is wholeheartedly committed to the arts. A fluid practice that moves between art curator, writer, and educator whilst studying for her PhD (oooff) on paper, Amelia is terrifyingly smart, yet in real life, she is the kindest and sweetest person to chat to. Her first three years of motherhood involved toggling between NYC and Sydney, an experience far from behind closed doors. Now after three years at the helm of one of Naarm’s independent art institutions, West Space, Amelia has landed a gig as an art curator at La Trobe Art Institute in the quieter side of Victoria, Bendigo, and is living in Castlemaine in a home she designed and built with her family of four. Amelia talks about early motherhood, her career, shifting gender roles and the recent exhibition Maternal Inheritance. The images that accompany these are some of my favourite - thank you Jessica Prescott for sharing these with us.
Image by Jessica Prescott
Hi Amelia. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your family and what your current practice involves - I know you wear many hats.
I live on Djaara, where I’m raising my two children with my partner, artist Justin Balmain. Alongside this, I am a curator, writer and academic. I write about artists, exhibitions and performances, and my research explores the potential and limits of art institutions in times of crisis. What this looks like is generally a lot of reading and conversations with artists and other curators. Having recently relocated to regional Victoria, into a little house we finished building last year, I’m focusing on growing meaningful connections to this place. As someone who’s ancestors arrived as settlers/colonisers, connection to place must recognise the immense privilege of living on stolen land, and the enduring resilience of the Dja Dja Wurrung in caring for this place.
You’ve been a mother for nearly 9 years now. What was the landscape of mother muses you lookup to when entering motherhood looked like?
When I was pregnant I didn't really hear motherhood talked about as an experience and condition in the arts, and I didn’t know where to find role models of arts leaders who were also mothers. 9 years on, I’m relieved to say this has changed. There is incredible organising around motherhood and parenting in the arts. Such as Artists/Parents website, Hettie Judah’s ‘How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers’ as well as many more informal networks, whatsapp groups, exhibitions and resources addressing the barriers and double standards faced by parents. Now I find role models and mentors everywhere, especially in the artists I work with.
You birthed Otto in Sydney and shortly after went back to NYC to finish a curatorial project. Can you let us know what those early days of motherhood looked like?
Otto was five months old when I took on a contract with Performa in New York as curator for their inaugural Australian Pavillion. My partner and I packed up our Potts Point apartment, put all of our belongings in storage and rented a furnished apartment on 116th St. My days and nights were full: producing and programming performances across New York City with a range of Australian artists. Every day I would meet Justin at Madison Square Park just down from the Performa offices, so I could breastfeed Otto. Then Justin and Otto would spend their day walking through Chelsea galleries or taking the subway to Brooklyn. Some nights I would take a subway home, feed Otto, and take a taxi back out to one of the performances. It was a very fulfilling experience, which would not have been possible without Justin taking on full time care responsibilities.
Image by Jessica Prescott
Your recent exhibition Maternal inheritances expands the notion of motherhood to encompass complex ideas of kinship, knowledge and caregiving. Can you please expand on the process of creating this.
Maternal inheritance is the scientific name for the transferal of cells between mother and offspring. With this exhibition, I really wanted to break open the idea of motherhood as a singular experience that was only relevant to people who had given birth. Instead, I wanted to emphasise that motherhood is universal, everyone has a mother, although, of course, there are varying degrees of complexity to this relationship. It was important to me that the exhibition include the voices of those who are not biological mothers, artists who instead speak to their relationship with their own mothers, of their community ties, or the ecological impacts of having children.
As is often the case in my curatorial work, conversations with artists were key to shaping the exhibition, as well as reading. A beautiful poem by Charmaine Papertalk Green titled ‘Gathering Data’ helped unlock some of my research around the cellular entanglements between mother and foetus in poetic terms. Later in my research, I revisited Jazz Money’s poem ‘if I write a poem’. Jazz expresses ideas of Country, inheritance, and matriarchy and generously allowed me to include this poem in the exhibition guide.
Some examples of the work that really resonated with you - stands out of the show.
Intuition and trust play a large part in commissioning art. The exact outcome is often unknown, but through trust and a shared language with an artist, it comes together. Although I knew the practice of Jahnne Pasco-White well, her commission for Maternal inheritances was wonderfully surprising. For the first time, Jahnne installed her paintings outside, they filled a courtyard, strung up on wires like washing to be dried. It also became a context for children to run and play, where they could touch and interact with the works.
Image by Jessica Prescott
To be mother is to…
Practice repair. Motherhood feels like a continuous breaking apart and coming together, equal parts painful and joyful.
Can you tell me the dynamics of how your household flows? Do you co-parent with your husband?
Negotiating creative work, paid work, house work, child care and a million house projects is a constant in our house. And a lot of this work is under-remunerated or unpaid, which is of course a bigger systemic problem caused by the undervaluing of care work and creative work. We try to approach everything as a team; in practical terms that looks like Justin doing pick-up, me finishing work to hang out with the kids while he preps and cooks dinner, eating as a family, and sharing the cleaning, and often working again once everyone is in bed. We recently swapped roles for 6 months, when I temporarily stepped away from my full-time job. I found balancing full-time care and part-time teaching work was far more challenging than my five-day-a-week desk job. Neither of us gets a lot of downtime, but we have a supportive community and creatively fulfilling work which helps keep things flowing.
Advice for people who travel and move with kids, you’ve inhabited many spaces in your kids lifetime.
Otto has lived in a different place for every year of his life, it's exhilarating but also exhausting to move around so much. To make it easier on us all, we try to have relaxed schedules and avoid too much (or anything?) booked in advance, which leaves plenty of time to wander, hang out at cafes, visit parks, decompress, change plans, and adapt.
The shift from one to two?
On a typical afternoon after school, Rune wants to show me the flowers on the strawberry bush, while Otto wants my help formatting the book he is writing on his inherited clunky old computer. The big age gap pulls them in very different directions, but then they come together in unexpected moments. Riding their bikes around the deck, getting excited over a grasshopper that found its way into our bathroom, sleeping curled up next to each other, and it’s blissful. Raising these two children 6 years apart, I sometimes experience an uncanny feeling of time folding back in on itself. As I relive the toddler years with Rune, it brings back all these forgotten memories from when Otto was little.
An ideal weekend feel like?
Coffee in bed and 15 minutes of quiet (ha!) gazing at the trees outside our bedroom window. A trip to the farmers' markets, a swim and kayak in our friend’s dam, dinner at our local pub. A walk with the dog and a long phone call with a friend in the twilight. A long bath underneath the stars. Rinse and repeat.