AFTER HER FIRST son was born in 2018, the painter, sculptor and conceptual artist Camille Henrot returned to the studio, eager to make work about anything other than birth. But to her surprise, sheets of blank white paper had become unbearable, and she soon found herself painting them a deep red, a color she’d never been drawn to before. “The whole studio looked like a blood factory,” she said, laughing. One day she went out to walk her dog, and a stranger asked if she was OK. She realized that her clothing was smeared with red paint — she looked as if she had just been through some violent event. “Am I OK?” she wondered. Maybe the aversion to white came from memories of being in the hospital, she thought. Or maybe it was about understanding “the dark side of the worship of purity and minimalism.” Whatever the reason, she started making many red paintings, some of which depicted women pumping milk.
She had stumbled into a gap in art history. While there’s no shortage of representations of mothers with their children, Henrot could find few of mothers on their own. The mother is “never dissociated from the gaze that turns her into an object or attribute of the child,” she writes in a 2023 essay called “Pump and Dump.” She thought of the pervasive image of the Pietà, but “that is a very disagreeable archetype because it’s an archetype of extreme suffering,” she told me recently. How, she’d wondered, could she portray a mother in a more neutral situation, as a subject in her own right?
Henrot scoured books and the internet for images of breast pumping — a technology that had been in use for millenniums but had almost never been depicted in painting. It’s a task that represents so many of the contradictory demands of motherhood — sitting still amid what can feel like nonstop motion, performing labor that isn’t compensated or particularly valued yet can also be a source of pleasure and pride. For Henrot, the hours she spent pumping were a nice break. The swooshing of the breast pump was soothing. It reminded her of summers in her youth when she milked goats at a farmhouse that her family rented in Chamonix, France.
The drawings and paintings that emerged from her pumping research became part of a series she titled “Wet Job” (2018-20). Like many of Henrot’s works, they are elegant yet childlike, with a tint of menace. In one, a brilliant red figure sits naked, with one leg folded across her knee, a pump attached to each breast, their cords snaking back to a compact yellow case. Her posture is relaxed, her big toe flicked upward, perhaps keeping time to the pump’s rhythmic underwater sounds. Her head is elongated, as if in a medieval helmet or a shroud. Milk seems to leak out of the pump onto her right breast and pool on her stomach. The image is ambiguous: inviting and sensuous and also a little gross, which is exactly what pumping is like, and the intersection where Henrot likes to place her work.
MOTHERHOOD HAS LONG been put in tension with serious art making. The feminist pioneer Judy Chicago, 85, lamented in 1985 that “as soon as one gives birth to a child, one is no longer free,” writing sympathetically of “a highly gifted artist whose conflicts between self-fulfillment and her child’s needs tear her apart with guilt.” Two decades later, Tracey Emin, now 61, whose most famous artworks include a catalog of the people she’s slept with and an installation of her own disheveled bed, said, “There are good artists who have children. … They are called men.” (Chicago and Emin never had children.) The conceptual artist Mary Kelly, 83, described being a woman artist as a “double negative.” Her own piece “Post Partum Document” (1973-79) is a rare example in contemporary art of a mother making serious work from her experience. In “Document,” Kelly investigated her son’s development — printing diagrams drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis alongside her son’s stained diaper liners, making casts of his tiny hands and indexing minute shifts in his behavior.
The idea of women having to choose between motherhood and art persists as a recurring debate. Today there are enough books on the topic to create a microgenre (recent ones include Sheila Heti’s “Motherhood” and Julie Phillips’s “The Baby on the Fire Escape”) and, every few years, one publication or another will revisit the question of whether or not a woman can be a dedicated artist and a good parent. The question is always directed at women, never men. Perhaps because it is still stigmatized in visual art, Henrot resists characterizing her work as being about motherhood, something she made clear when we talked in her studio this past spring. But it’s hard not to think of Henrot in relation to Kelly, since there are so few other contemporary artists who have addressed the labor of being a mother — and an artist-mother in particular. If Kelly’s work treats motherhood as an academic pursuit and attempts to contain and systematize its chaos, Henrot goes in the opposite direction: toward leakage, both literal and symbolic, tracing the ways in which motherhood is a portal to all aspects of life.
Henrot sees her practice — which encompasses an astonishing range of sculpture, film, printmaking, collage, installation and many drawings and paintings — as less about being a mother and more about having been a child: about attachment (healthy and pathological), about powerlessness, about learning social codes, about touch (tender; unwanted) and the mysteries of the preverbal. She tackles big subjects with little regard for predetermined hierarchies or systems of meaning — as if she’s piecing together her own model of the world.
Take her film “Grosse Fatigue,” which was her breakout in the art world when it won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2013. It’s a 13-minute exploration of the stories that cultures tell about the origins of the universe — a clever, impossible puzzle (how do you fit a whole cosmology into a short art film?) that draws together hundreds of disparate images in little zaps of association. A voice-over recites a proliferation of origin myths against a booming, suspenseful drum track. Images begin to multiply, like tabs being opened in a browser: a taxidermy bird on a table in a museum; men contemplating images of planets; a pair of leggings patterned with white galaxies of splotches; a painting by Jackson Pollock. Or “Interphones” (2015), her installation of charmingly analog phone sculptures that invite the viewer to dial into personal and philosophical conversations (one phone recites poetry, for example; another gives advice about dog training).
Henrot was drawn to the topic of motherhood not only because she became a mother but because of the absurdity of its remaining taboo as a subject of serious artistic investigation. It’s the most universal of relationships — most people on earth experience the dramas of love, care, inadequacy and separation between parent and child — yet one that the world is often invested in denying. In her essay collection, “Milkyways” (2023), Henrot argues that the neglect of mothers is an expression of collective shame. “Misogyny seems like a tool for society to rid itself of an outstanding, ever-growing debt to women, by devaluing what has been given,” she writes. “Nobody can bear the idea of having been given gift after gift that they cannot reciprocate — or repay.” She doesn’t exempt herself from such feelings. But when Henrot experiences shame, it becomes a clue. She doesn’t work with subject matter she’s comfortable with — often she doesn’t even work with things she likes. “I think everything I do is unresolved problems,” she told me — which makes her willingness to go where others won’t, her insistence that caregiving and early life can be a key to all mythologies, such an important intervention in the art world.
HENROT DESCRIBES HERSELF as having a “monkey mind,” leaping from branch to branch, with a headlong, associative method for pursuing her intuitions. She keeps lists of verbal expressions that please or confuse her and sometimes become the titles of her pieces. (She has lived in the United States for more than a decade but still speaks English with a thick French accent.) She gathers songs for the dozens of playlists she blares as she works. She collects pornographic manga and paintbrushes made from the hair of various creatures — horse, raccoon, goat, pig — that all produce very different strokes.
In her studio, which occupies an entire floor of a small office building in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, Henrot showed me a large collection of binders, some placed in rows on low shelves, others scattered on the floor, full of source imagery that she prints from the internet: cartoons, paintings, memes, photographs, personal snapshots. Sometimes she’s drawn to an artist’s technique, sometimes to the emotion that surfaces or to a connection from her own childhood. She flipped through the images, explaining what captured her. In one, a goddesslike figure leaned over at a right angle, allowing forest creatures to suckle from her six breasts. (“It’s erotic, but it’s also eco-feminism,” she said.) There were images from Picasso, Alice Neel, Egon Schiele (all artists whom she admires), and a painting of a mother and child from the Renaissance in which great care had been taken with the rendering of the child’s hand.
We sat at a table near a bank of windows and a wall hung with several Japanese calligraphy brushes so large that they looked like the tools of a mythical giant. She placed a fresh pot of tea between us, but we both got so caught up in our conversation that she never served it, and I never asked. She only grew somewhat more muted when we started discussing her childhood in France. Henrot worries about her work getting reduced to autobiography, she explained — and some of the memories are painful. When she began to make work featuring parents and children, “I think a lot of aspects of my own childhood resurfaced, in a way that was not always pleasant,” she said. “It was a bit like those monsters and ghosts and demons are out of the box, and now what do you do with them? And it was like, ‘OK, let’s dance.’”
Henrot’s mother is also an artist — she worked as a bird taxidermist, with clients including the French National Museum of Natural History, and engaged Henrot and her older sister in intricate projects, like building architectural models. She was creative, nonjudgmental and supportive of Henrot’s own creativity. Her father worked in telecommunications and helped to launch Minitel, a 1980s precursor to the World Wide Web that people could use to play games, buy train tickets and interact with strangers through their phone line. There were always new models of telephones around the house that Camille and her sister would use as toys. (“Pound signs became a poetical language,” she said.) The dependencies created by both family dynamics and technology are a theme in Henrot’s work.
From a very young age, Henrot drew constantly, to the exclusion of almost any other activity. Her mother would bring her reams of printer paper. Henrot liked to sequence images into stories, imitating the cartoons she loved to watch on TV. She was also fascinated by fights: “the magic around the fight and the escape, and the dreamlike quality of a story that is very viscerally about survival,” she explained. “I think all my stories as a child were about survival.”
Henrot was severely bullied at school and often lonely; she has dyslexia and dyscalculia, and her teachers were dismissive. Even years later, “Every time it’s requested of me to give an answer where only one answer is possible, it always brings me into turmoil,” she told me. “It’s the same when people ask me my age” — she’s 46 — “it’s hard to remember … numbers change!” I thought of Henrot’s sculpture “Misfits” (2022), a bronze cube reminiscent of a child’s toy, with shapes cut out of each side to be filled with a matching shape. Here, though, a cylinder is jammed into a square hole, stuck. The work suggests the rage and frustration of childhood, but also how play can reveal new possibilities. “Two and two doesn’t have to make four, they can also be 22,” Henrot once said in an interview. It’s interesting to regress to a state “where all these counterfactual possibilities are still there.”
We walked over to a worktable in a different part of the studio to look at images of her latest sculptures, some of which will be shown at Hauser & Wirth in New York next year. Henrot draws with the ease and pleasantness of breathing or dancing, but sculpture allows her to access aggression. When you make a sculpture, she explained, “you basically kill somebody. Because you cut, you slice — it’s pretty violent.” In one of the works, “73/37 (Abacus),” which was still in progress, a bronze shape with an undulating corkscrew texture that could double as a torso of a horse or a pair of breasts is placed under an archway of a giant abacus made of brass with rubber beads — a nod, perhaps, to her fear of numbers. It seems to be twirling in place — reminiscent of Bernini’s masterpieces of stilled, often violent, transformation. There’s a creaminess to the figure’s back, which almost beckons to be ridden or stroked. Critics have described Henrot’s sculptures as “haptic,” and she told me that she likes the idea of people touching her works, that they should “talk to the whole body and not just the brain.”
Her art often explores questions of authority and control. All over Henrot’s studio are drawings and paintings of dogs and other animals being commanded to rise up on their legs by a raised arm or a whip; sometimes a humanlike figure comes down to the animal’s level, seeking parity or perhaps closeness. In one of the many binders in her studio, there was a picture of a dog that Henrot met on the street. “I like how relaxed he is,” she said, “looking like a big baby.” But she was also interested in the leash as “an illustration of attachment. Because attachment requires care, but care is also control and control is also surveillance.”
During Covid-19, when Henrot; her husband, the Swiss musician and composer Mauro Hertig, 35; and their two sons found themselves for a time back at Henrot’s mother’s house in a small town an hour outside of Paris, the artist became fascinated by a few etiquette manuals that she found on her mother’s bookshelves. At first, she saw them as oppressive — synonymous with the constraint and sexism of middle-class European society. These manuals, and a dozen or so others that she has since collected, now live in her studio, and she showed me one from 1884 called “Don’t.” She laughed. “When you read, ‘Don’t do this,’ it actually makes you want to do it,” she said. The books became the basis for a body of paintings called “Dos and Don’ts,” large canvases that Henrot creates through a laborious combination of digital printing, paper collage, layers of painting and sometimes laser-cut aluminum and plexiglass, and that incorporate pages of text from etiquette guides, images of her home life, her own illustrations and screenshots of computer error messages. It’s hard to tell what has been made by hand and what has been generated digitally, reflecting the way that social media scuttles our sense of reality. The more etiquette books she read, the more she found them oddly comforting — the way they neatly break down the rules of social life, just as a parent might do for a child.
ONE AFTERNOON IN early June, I returned to Henrot’s studio. I’d wanted to see her paint because her mode of working sounded especially intense. She’d mentioned an almost compulsive need for music, the way she’d sometimes break into a dance while working. I suggested that I would simply watch; we wouldn’t have to talk. When I arrived, her studio manager instructed me to enter the large room where Henrot works. Several other assistants stood in the back washing brushes and mixing paints — purples, oranges, yellows, greens. In the front, facing the big, bright windows, Henrot was at a table strewn with tubs of paint and vases holding hundreds of brushes.
Ambient music played loudly, but Henrot didn’t look up. She was applying paint with a six-inch-wide brush, layering greens and blues onto sheets she’d already painted in cantaloupe orange and speckled blue. As I watched her, I thought of something she’d told me during my previous visit. She was once invited to a symposium where a philosopher explained that the difference between the pornographic and the erotic came down to whether you painted a bowl of strawberries in a way that makes you want to eat the strawberries or in a way that looks beautiful. Henrot disagreed. For “a bowl of strawberries to be beautiful, you need to want to eat it, or you need to be disgusted by it,” she said. In other words, beauty must elicit a bodily response. Some of the paintings by Henrot that I love most depict mothers literally eating their babies, or babies swallowing their mothers — images both harrowing and comfortingly familiar.
Two or three big strokes of the brush, and there was Henrot’s line: curvy, playful, recalling the humor and directness and melancholy of the cartoonist Saul Steinberg, whom Henrot reveres, but with a sharp grace of its own. She’d apply some paint and then, grasping the paper in her hand, walk to another table in front of the windows and lay it out to dry. She’d then take up another piece of paper, bring it back to her workstation and begin drawing with her brush, often referring to an image in a plastic sleeve from one of her binders. She produced creatures of miraculous precision: two horses galloping and bucking alongside each other; a caracal with its elongated ears and a mess of whiskers; a large-nosed woman nuzzling a bird that seemed to dissolve. Henrot worked quickly, creating these images in two or three minutes. She never spoke to me, and only acknowledged me once, with a wide smile.
I was seeing, in real time, how Henrot’s binders of random imagery had led to these works, how it all seemed an extension of her free-associating mind. A conversation about breast milk becomes a conversation about debt. Thinking about lullabies and their dark lyrics draws you into a consideration of 19th-century French rape culture. When she began making work about the beginning of life, she realized that it wasn’t just about her, or her childhood or children but about “the whole world, how it’s built, how we think.” To me, Henrot’s methods seem intimately connected to the idea of motherhood. It’s motherhood not as subject matter but as mode of inquiry: the domestic and intimate as the route to understanding and confronting every corner of the human universe.
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