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 which 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, progressive 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.
Introduction Jacqueline Millner and Gretchen Coombs
Part 1: Caring relations: collaborating, parenting
Chapter 1 Care, interrelatedness and creative practices: The Care Project (2018-2022): Jacqueline Millner
Chapter 2 Creative care: modelling caring practices through artistic collaborations in neurodiverse and palliative-care contexts: Catherine Bell
Chapter 3 Improvising caring: Catherine Ryan
Chapter 4 Mental illness, care and the bad mother: Sylvia Griffin
Chapter 5 Soiling the white cube: artist parent experiences: Nina Ross, Lizzy Sampson and Jessie Scott
Part 2: Care and materiality: bodies, craft, textiles
Chapter 6 Mattering bodies in a mattering world: Katie Lee
Chapter 7 Remaining alert to an ethos of care: the responsiveness of artistic process: Kylie Banyard
Chapter 8 The migrant material: Azza Zein
Chapter 9 Threads of Resistance: feminist activism, collaborative making and care ethics: Rachael Haynes
Chapter 10 Care through craft: making in defence of Human Rights: Tal Fitzpatrick and Stephanie Dunlap
Part 3: Care: value, work, institution
Chapter 11 Sex work, care work and art work in Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Therese Henningsen’s Maintenancer (2018): Benison Kilby
Chapter 12 Care-full reading: towards a speculative practice of study in the university: Andrew Goodman
Chapter 13 Alleviating anxiety: care in action during the pandemic: Rebecca Mayo
Chapter 14 Working in the Trouble and Jane Bennett’s Middle Ground: animating creative projects in the Australian Anthropocene: Elizabeth Day
Chapter 15 FAVOURECONOMY: sharing alternative value in the arts: Stella Chen and Claire Field
Chapter 16 Caring about the vast non-existent horizon: cosmographic infrastructures and performances of care in twenty-first century feminist art practice: Nancy Mauro-Flude
Part 4: Artist pages
Chapter 17
Sam Bews, Elements (The Language of My Mother, Second Iteration), 2021
Rebekah Pryor, Saltcellars, 2017
Ebony Muller, CARE DANCE, 2017–2020
Louisa Bufardeci, Tacking, 2019–ongoing
Linda Judge, Mum, 2019
Part 5: Care and earth: doting, healing, advocating
Chapter 18 Patch/work, re/pair: a braided dialogue on breakage, fires, and the labours of care: Deb Cleland and Zsuzsi Soboslay
Chapter 19 Capturing the air: care in the field of measurement: Jessie Boylan
Chapter 20 Stand your ground: global solidarity through creative care Caroline Phillips
Chapter 21 A manifesto of care: Keely Macarow
Biography
Jacqueline Millner is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at La Trobe University, 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 public 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-author of Creative Practice Ethnographies (2019) and author of The Lure of the Social: Encounters with Contemporary Artists (2021).
