Artist Database

Rina Noto works full-time at a bronze foundry. She is closely involved with casting bronze sculptures for other artists. She interrupted her art career to raise her kids. They are now young adults. She chose to work in the arts industry but had very little time to pursue her own practice. Picking up her art career after 30 years, she is confronted with how her artistic voice has changed. She is in the middle of completing her BA Fine Art Honours degree at WITS. Mothers are often required to lay down their lives and dreams. She is processing how mothers are viewed, and the impact raising kids has on female artists’ careers.

“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”

Adrienne Rich — Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“My work explores the mother’s body as a contoured landscape, with my own body as the site of that investigation. Pregnancy pushes a mother’s intestines aside to make room, and her stretch marks read like topographical markers on a territory now possessed by someone other than herself. Michel Serres calls the vulva, vagina and uterus the “first place” — and it is children, not men, who are its true occupiers. To map or mark land is to claim it; I am mapping my own existence the same way. My ink drawings
are sedimentary, built in layers that hold what is transitory and a deep feeling of displacement. It is no accident that we call it motherhood” — a -hood, like a neighbourhood, a place you dwell in rather than a role you occupy. In Afrikaans, I call this place “Moederland”. For many years I felt invisible, suspended in-between, my sense of self diminished by motherhood. This work takes up Serres’ call for women to “re-appropriate the organs of their own bodies” as its own task. My practice is that attempt — and, in
doing so, a way to work through the fragmentation I have felt since becoming my children’s locus.”