Martina Mullaney

Martina Mullaney is in the process of completing her PhD by practice at the University of Reading. Her research looks at the Missing Mother from the canon that is art history and feminist art. Her practice challenges established forms of art on maternity. It moves beyond body-centric essentially determinate art where the maternal experience is explicit in the work, to adopt activist, social, and political manifestations. Works make reference to the patriarchal nature of language, the construct of the neoliberal patriarchal family and matricide to refigure the mother as a political and social experience, one suppressed by a societal and scholarly norms that isolates mothers, creatively, and intellectually.

She graduated with an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in 2004. She won the Red Mansion Art Prize in 2003, and has exhibited with Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Gallery of Photography, Dublin and Ffotogallery, Cardiff. After the birth of her daughter she initiated the project Enemies of Good Art in 2009 a multi-disciplinary research project interrogating motherhood as experience and the art world. The project was executed through a series of public meetings, performances, lectures and live radio discussions. Events took place at; Tate Modern, the ICA, Southbank Centre and Chisenhale Gallery. Tranzit Display Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic and Galerija Nova, Zagreb in 2015. Enemies of God Art also broadcast on Resonance 104.4FM.