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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

I left my baby to write this. How do artists balance creativity and the ache for their child?

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Barbara Hepworth Julie Phillips Doris Lessing Toni Morrison
Pulitzer prize-winning author Toni Morrison photographed in New York City in 1979.
‘Toni Morrison [pictured in 1979] got up to write before her children woke.’ Photograph: Jack Mitchell/Getty Images

Since having a baby, I have never felt more creatively inspired, and never more frustrated. “The fire is still on, I’m just on the back burner,” I might say – one of the phrases in the artist Andi Galdi Vinko’s transcendent photo book, Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back.

It chronicles motherhood in all its strange, visceral, leaky realism, as well as its naturalistic beauty. Recently, it has become a visual bible for me, as I wonder what it is to be on the back burner, or even to disappear, at a time when the tension between caring and creating has never felt more acute.

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