Care Ethics and Art

317 Pages·2021·8.728 MB·English

by  Jacqueline Millner (editor), Gretchen Coombs (editor)

Care Ethics and Art
What would it mean to substitute care for economics as the central concern
of politics? This anthology invites analysis, reflections and speculations on
how contemporary artists and creative practitioners engage with, interpret,
and enact care in practices that might forge an alternative ethics in the age
of neoliberalism.
Interdisciplinary and innovative, it brings together contributions from
artists, researchers and practitioners who creatively consider how care can
be practised in a range of contexts, including environmental ethics, pro-
gressive pedagogies, cultures of work, alternative economic models, death
literacy advocacy, parenting and mothering, deep listening, mental health,
disability and craftivism.
Care Ethics and Art contributes new modes of understanding these fields,
together with practical solutions and models of practice, while also offering
new ways to think about recent contemporary art and its social function.
The book will benefit scholars and postgraduate research students in the
fields of art, art history and theory, visual cultures, philosophy and gender
studies, as well as creative and arts practitioners.
Jacqueline Millner is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at La Trobe Univer-
sity, Australia. Her books include Conceptual Beauty (2010), Fashionable Art
(with A. Geczy, 2015), Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes
(co-edited with Catriona Moore, 2018) and Contemporary Art and Feminism
(with Catriona Moore, 2021). She has co-curated major exhibitions and pub-
lic programs including Curating Feminism (2014), Future Feminist Archive
(2015) and Femflix (2016).
Gretchen Coombs is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Design and Creative
Practice Enabling Capability Platform at RMIT, Australia. She is a co-a uthor
of Creative Practice Ethnographies (2019) and author of The Lure of the Social:
Encounters with Contemporary Artists (2021).

Care Ethics and Art
Edited by
Jacqueline Millner and
Gretchen Coombs
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Jacqueline Millner and
Gretchen Coombs; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Jacqueline Millner and Gretchen Coombs to be
identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors
for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Millner, Jacqueline, editor. | Coombs, Gretchen, editor.
Title: Care ethics and art / edited by Jacqueline Millner and
Gretchen Coombs.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2022. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021022772 (print) | LCCN 2021022773 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367765651 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367765644 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003167556 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Arts and society. | Arts—Moral and ethical aspects. |
Caring—Moral and ethical aspects.
Classification: LCC NX180.S6 C368 2022 (print) | LCC NX180.S6 (ebook) |
DDC 701/.03—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022772
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022773
ISBN: 978-0-367-76565-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-76564-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-16755-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003167556
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
List of contributors x
List of figures xvii
Introduction: care ethics and art 1
JACQUELINE MILLNER AND GRETCHEN COOMBS
PART I
Caring relations: collaborating, parenting 9
1 Care, interrelatedness and creative practices: The Care Project
(2018–2022) 11
JACQUELINE MILLNER
2 Creative care: modelling caring practices through artistic
collaborations in neurodiverse and palliative care contexts 25
CATHERINE BELL
3 Improvising caring 38
CATHERINE RYAN
4 Mental illness, care and the bad mother 55
SYLVIA GRIFFIN
5 Soiling the white cube: artist parent experiences 67
NINA ROSS, LIZZY SAMPSON AND JESSIE SCOTT
vi Contents
PART II
Care and materiality: bodies, craft, textiles 81
6 Mattering bodies in a mattering world 83
KATIE LEE
7 Remaining alert to an ethos of care: the responsiveness of
artistic process 94
KYLIE BANYARD
8 The migrant material 106
AZZA ZEIN
9 Threads of Resistance: feminist activism, collaborative making
and care ethics 119
RACHAEL HAYNES
10 Care through craft: making in defence of Human Rights 131
TAL FITZPATRICK AND STEPHANIE DUNLAP
PART III
Care: value, work, institution 145
11 Sex work, care work and art work in Sidsel Meineche Hansen
and Therese Henningsen’s Maintenancer (2018) 147
BENISON KILBY
12 Care-full reading: towards a speculative practice of study in
the university 158
ANDREW GOODMAN
13 Alleviating anxiety: care in action during the pandemic 173
REBECCA MAYO
14 Working in the Trouble and Jane Bennett’s middle ground:
animating creative projects in the Australian Anthropocene 185
ELIZABETH DAY
15 FAVOURECONOMY: sharing alternative value in the arts 196
STELLA CHEN AND CLAIRE FIELD
Contents vii
16 Caring about the vast non-existent horizon: cosmographic
infrastructures and performances of care in twenty-first
century feminist art practice 212
NANCY MAURO-FLUDE
PART IV
Artist pages 225
17 Artist pages 227
Sam Bews, Elements (The Language of My Mother, Second
Iteration), 2021 227
Rebekah Pryor, Saltcellars, 2017 230
Ebony Muller, CARE DANCE, 2017–2020 233
Louisa Bufardeci, Tacking, 2019–ongoing 236
Linda Judge, Mum, 2019 239
PART V
Care and earth: doting, healing, advocating 241
18 Patch/work, re/pair: a braided dialogue on breakage, fires and
the labours of care 243
DEB CLELAND AND ZSUZSI SOBOSLAY
19 Capturing the air: care in the field of measurement 257
JESSIE BOYLAN
20 Stand your ground: global solidarity through creative care 268
CAROLINE PHILLIPS
21 A manifesto of care 279
KEELY MACAROW
Index 287
Acknowledgements
To begin with, we acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands upon
which this book is written: the Dja Dja Wurrung and Jaara people, part
of the Kulin alliance of Aboriginal Victorian peoples in Central Victoria;
the Bunurong Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples of the
Eastern Kulin Nation; the Yuggera people; the Ngunnawal people; and the
Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We respect their elders, past and pres-
ent, as a way to signal our respect for and openness to First Nations’ ways of
being and belonging to the world. We recognise that Australian Indigenous
peoples, lands, practices, bodies and knowledges are still sovereign, and
that without meaningful constitutional recognition of unceded sovereignty,
to live and share this land is to share this predicament. Acknowledgement
of country is a prompt to examine this quandary and what it might mean for
care, art and ethics today.
We are deeply indebted to all the members of the Care Network, the many
artists, writers, and researchers from around the country—including Cen-
tral and North Western Victoria, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide
and Canberra—who participated in Care Project workshops, roundtables
and symposia over the last three years, creating supportive and inclusive
spaces to build a community, the very rationale of the project. Many of
them have gone on to become contributors to this volume: we thank all the
contributors for their generous and generative thoughts and practices, their
inspiring artwork and writing, and the permission to publish their work.
We are ever grateful to the wonderful Care Project research assistants, both
exceptional artists and scholars and exemplars of care: Dr Caroline Phillips,
who was instrumental in organising the roundtables and Care Symposium,
and Dr Barbara Campbell, who undertook early literature reviews and
came back to assist with final submission.
The Care Project could not have happened without the support of La
Trobe University, which through the DVC Research and the School of Hu-
manities and Social Sciences funded Jacqueline with a three-year start up
grant. We are also indebted to the generous partners who supported our
program, including: Sandie Bridie and George Paton Gallery (University of
Melbourne), Jo Holder and Cross Arts Projects (Sydney) and the School of
Acknowledgements ix
Art, Australian National University. We are very grateful to Routledge, in
particular Lucy Batrouney and Sarah Pickles, for their interest and support
in publishing this anthology, a substantial outcome of The Care Project and
its many conversations and imaginings.
Jacqueline would like to acknowledge the support of her family: partner
JP and children Zac, Jaspar and Bella, who are her constant rationale and
model for working towards a more caring world. Gretchen would like to
thank Jacqueline for inviting her to be a part of such a substantial con-
tribution to caring practices. Her friendship and mentoring have modelled
care throughout the process of creating this anthology. Gretchen would like
to thank her partner Jason and sons Ryley and Beckett, who consistently
demonstrate caring acts.
Jacqueline and Gretchen