MANTRA AS MEDIUM

My quest for necessary wisdom about mothering, teaching, researching—coalescing here as art and research—comes by way of a mantra enacted between mother and daughter onto the world: milk, heat, time. An awareness of mantra as methodologically potent occurred through the artistic practice of drawing with mother’s milk, heat, and time. Traveling through the twists and overlaps of my complicated existence as a mother, artist, teacher, and researcher this paper offers three imaginable potencies for arts-based research: mantra unfolds myth, mantra intensifies listening, and mantra generates reciprocity. This contemplatively and performatively crafted text brings to light these three potencies through multiple modes of data-creation: mantra, time, drawing, sensation, song, memory, connection, affect, photographs, writing, and materiality. Linger with me in the place where unconsumed mother’s milk—fat and water separating in plastic sleeves and bound for the trash in a university childcare setting— coalesced with cultural myths of breastfeeding, embodied memories of labor and returning to work after childbirth, grassy-scented infant’s breath, lullabies, milk scorching on a hot iron, cotton clothing, silver salts embedded in light-sensitive paper, and more. Linger and listen—water, bodies, stories, hidden, unhidden.