LENKA CLAYTON’s work considers, exaggerates and alters the accepted rules of everyday life, extending the familiar into the realms of the poetic and absurd.In previous works she has hand-numbered 7,000 stones; searched for all 613 people mentioned in a single edition of a German newspaper; filmed one person of each age from 1 to 100, and reconstituted a lost museum from a sketch on the back of an envelope. She and writer Michael Crowe are currently in the middle of writing a unique, personal letter to every household in the world.

In 2012, after the birth of her first child, Clayton founded An Artist Residency in Motherhood — a structured, fully-funded artist residency that takes place inside her own home and life as a mother of two young children (currently 2 and a half & 8 months old). Artist residencies are usually designed as a way to allow artists to escape from the routines and responsibilities of their everyday lives. An Artist Residency in Motherhood is different. Set firmly inside the traditionally “inhospitable” environment of a family home, it subverts the art-world’s romanticization of the unattached artist, and frames motherhood as a valuable site, rather than an invisible labor, for exploration and artistic production.For the duration of the residency (until May 2014) Lenka Clayton aims to embrace the fragmented mental focus, exhaustion, nap-length studio time and countless distractions of parenthood as well as the absurd poetry of time spent with young children as her working materials and situation, rather than obstacles to be overcome. All of Lenka Clayton’s works in this exhibition were created during An Artist Residency in Motherhood.

The Distance I Can Be From My Son, Digital Video; image courtesy of the artist.