ARTISTS STATEMENT
In this 9-minute low-tech video, I explore motherhood through a series of performances that blur the line between ritual and daily life. The work emerges from a fundamental question: How has motherhood changed me? How do I embody the changes? Through the video lens, I appear in multiple personas—marked by changing wigs, changing rituals and changing environments—as I perform the cyclical tasks and rituals of maternal care: the hanging outdoor laundry; requirements of hair and self-care; a bathing in milk; all sacred acts of tending.
The visual language of Motherlode draws from my childhood landscapes: the Illinois prairie grasslands growing tall, then burning and regenerating; and Lake Michigan’s sand dunes swelling and receding with the seasons. These natural rhythms echo through the work as metaphors for maternal depletion and renewal. The landscape interweaves with staged performances, while objects passed down through generations—my grandmother’s hand mirror, my mother’s mixing bowl—appear as recurring motifs.
Motherlode creates a space where the mundane transforms into the sacred, where domestic tasks become ceremonies, and where the absurd and holy aspects of mothering coexist. Through its layered performances and imagery, the video celebrates the cyclical nature of maternal experience—a story that echoes from my mother, and hers before her, into my own evolving journey of identity.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Laura Litten is an interdisciplinary artist based in Washington, DC. Her anthropological fieldwork with Indigenous communities in the South Pacific and local cultures in the US and Italy have profoundly shaped her artistic practice, which spans video art, digital painting, and multimedia installations. A former Professor of Television, Aesthetics and Popular Culture at Columbia College Chicago, Litten brings ethnographic methods and cultural understanding to her creative work.
Her current video work explores the body’s chronological transformation and its relationship to physical and psychological space, as evidenced in her recent video piece Motherlode. Litten believes that, “Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning… it is one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole.” Her work employs this universal aspect of human experience, using humor and play to investigate the tensions between body, society, and environment.
Litten holds an MA in Art History from the University of Chicago and has worked extensively as a filmmaker and photographer in both artistic and anthropological contexts. Following her move to Washington, DC in 2008, she began experimenting with a distinctive low-tech narrative form combining horizontal inked landscapes with sound compositions evoking the open Midwestern landscapes of her childhood. Her methodology, informed by decades of ethnographic research and artistic exploration, combines rigorous investigation with playful experimentation, revealing how humor and ritual serve as bridges across cultural boundaries and personal transformations.
© Laura Litten