Orla McHardy

Animation and the maternal are parallel acts. There are striking overlaps between animation practice and the pooled maternal time of maintenance and caregiving: repetitive actions and gestures, interruption, incremental and elongated time, cycles, the embodied experience of slow mundane practices, the durational drag of staying alongside something or someone. In both instances ‘what is hidden, however, is not just labour but the time embedded within this labour.’(2) I will explore animation’s formal self-reflexiveness and media specific histories to reveal where value is placed (and not placed) on the time of these shared invisible labours. Possibilities emerge from thinking these invisible labours together, revealing the problematics of what constitutes a rightful subject or object of mothering, and what constitutes a rightful subject or object of animation. By re-positioning my maternal animation practice as a theory – I plan to suggest new ways to think about animation through animation. If the ‘our’ is to have any meaning in the normative judgement of ‘our times’ in the worldpolitical present, then explanation and normative judgement of ‘our times’ has to become sensitive to a multiplicity of times and temporalities.(3)

In 2016, as a new mother, I was initially emboldened by Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts(4), to embrace the interrupted time of motherhood as a subject worthy of critical investigation. In paying close attention to what is specific to maternal time and why this time matters, I follow the second-wave move to uncouple maternity and femininity interpreting the maternal in the broadest sense. This opens the maternal to include any act of ongoing caregiving and maintenance, of staying alongside another, whether “that is of their birth, adopted, fostered, community, surrogate or ‘other’ children.”(5 )If we take this ‘other’ child that we are to care for as non-human, a project, an ecology, a system, how can close attention to the time of maternal care reveal possibilities about thinking and living in more-than-human-worlds?(6) And how can an expanded lens of animation mirror this expanded understanding of mothering? Where maintenance (and animation) is the temporal expression of care, it is also a set of “durational practices that keep ‘things’ going; objects, selves, systems, hopes, ideals, networks, communities, relationships, institutions.” What can maternal time teach us about ‘taking care’ of time in a moment when the ways we imagine and experience time are changing dramatically in the face of unprecedented sociological inequalities and intense ecological uncertainty?

Orla McHardy’s work spans single-channel films and site-specific gallery installations that incorporate. expanded animation, sculpture, written material, sound and video. A recent recipient of the Irish Arts Council’s Film Project Award, she is currently working on a long-form experimental animation/video/motion-capture piece. Recent screenings of her work have included the Anthology Film Archives, Ann Arbor Film Festival, DOK Leipzig and Kinodot Film Festival, where she won Best Film . She is currently an Assistant Professor and Graduate Director in the Dept. of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia. She lives and works between Donegal (IRL) and Richmond (USA).