good ENOUGH
work in progress
Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child) first published in Berlin 1930 is a collection of photographs by German photographer, Hedda Walther. The photographs are unusual for their time, very few people had the means to capture such intimate images. I first came across this book in the remnants of a personal library belonging to a German Jewish mother and her two daughters, who fled Germany for England in 1938. I imagine it was in their suitcases when they arrived in England.
I’m both drawn to and disturbed by their sentimental idealism. This book must have been circulating widely in German households (it was republished several times) just a few years before the emergence of National Socialism’s veneration of German motherhood. My mother is German.
The images remind me of my longing for the ‘perfect mother ‘ and to be a ‘perfect mother’. The child psychologist, DW Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough” parent was profoundly significant to me in learning to gently accept my own (and my mother’s) fallibility and imperfections.
There’s a gap, a slip, a crack in the images that I’m choosing to work with… drawing, cutting, layering, collaging. The mother and child are not quite ‘perfectly’ engrossed in each other. The child is gazing or wriggling away. The mother’s attention is elsewhere or in conflict with the child. Like me, Hedda Walther seems to have been drawn to these moments.
DW Winnicott proposed the concept of the ‘good enough’ parent in reaction to the proliferation in the early 1950s of professional parenting advice manuals. He argued that in order to develop into a rounded, resilient adults, children need to experience some disappointments and failures in meeting their needs. Good enough being actually better than “perfect”.
The concept of ‘good enough’ is at the heart of all the ‘Admitting the Possibilities of Error’ drawings. Trying my best to draw the perfect line, gently accepting my wobbles, absorbed and fascinated by the emerging patterns.
