Acclaimed for her exploration of the physiological and emotional transformations in motherhood, the artist has turned her attention to microplastics and "what it means for us to be born with plastic inside of us."
When she joined the faculty of Weitzman in the fall of 2021, Ani Liu was creating multimedia works that examined the effects that emerging technologies have on our lives and communities. In an interview from that time, she said she was "using the tools of science and technology to create emotional experiences." In a recent conversation, Liu describes her more recent projects, including the work she currently has on view at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, as well as Creative Research, a course that she is teaching for the first time this semester.
When we last spoke, four years ago, you had recently had your second child. Since then, the subject of motherhood has become much more central to your work. Can you talk about how motherhood has changed your practice as an artist?
A few years ago, I learned a word I really love: matrescence. It is the idea that one doesn't just become a mother upon giving birth. Instead, motherhood is a process kind of like adolescence, it can take a few years to continually unfold. I think that was very true for me. I became a mother for the first time in 2019. There was a series of first time revelations, the experience of giving birth, of breastfeeding, of caring for a young baby. The immense bodily changes, a shift in perspective. And all of this was occurring while I was probably the most sleep deprived I had ever been.
That first year of motherhood, I struggled with a changing sense of identity. On the one hand, it felt somewhat important for me to hold onto the life I had before having a child. I was, and possibly still am, quite a workaholic. It's a big part of my identity to be an artist, to teach, to be a researcher, to produce rigorously. In the very beginning, through the sleep deprived haze of caring for a newborn, I wondered how it would be possible to make work the way I used to again.
Well, newborns don’t stay newborns forever, and I’m happy to say we’ve mostly recovered from that part of our life – however, becoming a parent ripped open new portals in me – and I feel forever changed, for the better. The experience has revealed different aspects of the lived experience, which has been incredibly meaningful and important to me.
At some point I realized parenthood is my reality now, and I needed to make it work. Being a little bit nerdy, I couldn't help but also intellectualize motherhood, and research it like any other topic. Something that resonated with me was the history of care work as a form of essential labor that is often invisible and uncompensated. Care work is something that allows the world to run. During the pandemic, when there was a childcare shortage, it created a crisis. No one can simultaneously parent toddlers and Zoom eight hours a day. Reflecting on my own experiences, reading about the history, biology, sociology, and design of motherhood and making work in my studio about motherhood allowed me to be honest to the kind of changes that were happening to me, documenting the process of matrescence that I was experiencing.
Untitled (Labor of Love), 2022, breastmilk, diaper hydrogel, diaper cotton, glass, acrylic
One of the first works I made on this topic came out of a medical experience where my infant’s pediatrician wanted to know how many times my baby dirtied her diaper that day, and what time was her last feed? And in my sleep deprived haze of the moment, I had no idea. From that moment on, for a month, I kept a meticulous log of every single time she was fed and every single time she had a diaper change, putting all this data on a spreadsheet. Two years later, I decided to make this into an artwork, Untitled (Labor of Love), which is a sculptural ledger of every time she was fed and changed. Looking at it sometimes blows me away – you can see that she was cared for at all hours of the day- diaper changes at 2 in the morning, nursing sessions at 4 in the morning. Counting the feeds, sometimes she was fed from my body more than twelve times a day.
It has been a really meaningful piece to show. While it is a portrait of my family’s first month with a baby, it’s also a universal portrait of what it’s like to care for a new life. So many people who've seen it have come up to me and said, “Wow, this really brings back memories!” while some people have confessed "I had no idea my wife went through that. I have to call her right now and thank her for what she did." Seeing the sheer number of hours of this relatively invisible work makes the labor of care really explicit, and allows for these conversations to enter public spaces.
Untitled (pumping), 2022, food grade tubing, liquid pump, air pump, solenoid valve, microcontroller, synthetic milk
Another work, Untitled (pumping), is about the labor of pumping breast milk. When I had my second child, I had to return to work shortly after giving birth to maintain my health insurance. As a result, in order to feed him, I had to pump all the time. While pumping, I reflected on my relationship to this machine that was both liberating – (for instance, I could feed him across space and time), but also antagonist in some ways: it is a technology that can be used to compel women to return to the workforce regardless of whether they are ready. Because we have this technology, an employer can just hang a sign on a door that just says "lactation space," and expect new mothers to figure it out. It made me think a lot about what simple technology enables versus the types of social systems needed to truly support postpartum care.
In the last few years, I have also been conducting research and making work around microplastics. In this day and age, we all have microplastics in our body, in our blood, in our brain, literally every part of our bodies. A few years ago, I read a paper about how researchers in Italy had found microplastics in breast milk, which shocked me. And I thought, would I be able to reproduce their findings in my own body? For the last year and a half, I've been distilling microplastics out of my breast milk, with a goal of making a sculptural installation about the experience.
I've been thinking a lot about what it means for us to be born with plastic inside of us. I went through a whole arc of emotions. At first, I was in shock and was horrified, then I was depressed, and now I'm in this other zone, thinking about what it means to be a human in this reality and how we can cope with it. At the beginning of the project, I tried to purge all plastics from my family’s diet; we exchanged a lot of food containers from plastic to glass, for instance. But in the last year, l've been thinking about the systemic issues that cause us to consume so much plastic. Individual choices can matter, sure, but the bulk of microplastics entering my body aren’t really from choices that I have a lot of individual control over. It’s in our air, in our water. Every time a car brakes on the road, microplastics are released in the air from the tires and I'm breathing it. Every time clothing with synthetic textiles are washed, microplastics are released in the water. What are the broad infrastructural or manufacturing policy revisions that need to occur to enact broader change? I'm looking for collaborators around Penn. If anyone who reads this knows someone in the sciences working on microplastics detection and/or Raman spectroscopy, l'd love an introduction!
Untitled (pregnancy menswear), 2020–ongoing, silk organza, suiting boning
Through March 15, you have work in an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts and Design in New York called Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births. Tell us about the work you have in that show.
The piece I have in the Museum of Art and Design, Untitled (pregnancy menswear) was made in conversation with several trans persons about their journeys into parenthood.
These were incredibly vulnerable and intimate conversations because, as we know, trans-care is incredibly difficult to get in the US, especially now. A lot of people I spoke with talked about the precarity of being able to transition into their gender, so many were really scared to extend that conversation with their healthcare providers to broach the subject of fertility or future family planning. Some people I spoke with didn't think that was even an option.
The work in the show is a sculpture that explores non-female and transgender pregnancy through suiting. The design was informed by a series of conversations I had with trans and nonbinary persons regarding fertility and what gender affirming garments looked and felt like to them. Several persons I spoke with talked extensively about how much they loved blazers, and the social power of a well crafted suit. We also talked about the difficulties of getting adequate healthcare, the pain of being deadnamed, the difficulty of getting the correct pronouns on health records. The work in the Museum of Arts and Design explores how design can normalize and remake stigmatized assumptions between gender, sex, fertility, and parenthood. Made with silk and backlit with panels meant to resemble the mirrors in a dressing room, the garment is designed to appear as a sketch of an idea, holding possibility and transformation.
Research has always been so core to your practice. And now you are teaching a course on research. What does research mean for artists?
This question sparks other questions like, what is research? What is knowledge? How is knowledge produced? How is the knowledge that artists and designers create different from, say, what a physicist creates, or a mathematician, economist, or historian? Part of this course is trying to answer these questions through exploring research from different angles.
The course is broken down into modules, and the first one looks at observation, documentation, and the scientific gaze. The students explore drawing as a form of research. We look at Leonardo da Vinci's drawings and see how drawing is an act of thinking and interpretation. Drawing is a very active process of seeing. When you draw, you make decisions about what you want to record and what you don't record.
You have to make a visual hierarchy of what you want to emphasize or de-emphasize. We look at the drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Ernst Haeckel, Vija Celmins, among others. We observe how these scientists and artists make connections in real time through diagrams and the act of drawing. The students visit the Penn Museum and we do several fun drawing exercises so they can explore what “objectivity” looks like visually.
The second class is all about archives. We ask, what is an archive? What is the difference between an archive and a pile of stuff? And we visit the Penn Libraries and speak with librarians to learn about the amazing archives the university houses. Then the students have an assignment to create their own archives. Who gets remembered in an archive? Who gets erased? There are power structures embedded in who controls the creation of an archive. The students are asked to look critically at history, reflect on their own lives, and create a missing archive. For instance, some of them might choose to patch the gaps in the contributions of women in science.
Later in the course, we look at other topics, including data visualization, biodesign, art in laboratories, and materiality as a form of research. Throughout the course we visit different resources at Penn, including the Materials library, Penn Museum, and the digital fabrication facilities at Tangen Hall. Students in the course come from a lot of different academic backgrounds, which is exciting. Beyond my MFA students, I have a student in the Graduate School of Education, a graduate student in the Engineering school concentrating in Computer Graphics & Game Technology. I have undergrads that are double majoring in neuroscience and design, and I love the diversity of interests and expertise. I think it’s really important, the kind of interdisciplinary conversations and discoveries that occur when all of these students are in the room together.
At the top of your syllabus for Creative Research, you include a quote from Albert Einstein: "The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science." Tell us how that is the entry point for the course.
There's something really interesting and mysterious, I think, about the ingredients that coalesce into a “Eureka!” moment. For both artists and scientists, it involves processes in which you have to do a lot of experimentation in your studio or lab. Both scientists and artists have methodologies that help them achieve these breakthroughs, to help deliver these new ideas that they're trying to bring to the world. What I'm interested in doing in my own practice, and with my students, is to both play and practice different amalgamations of these processes so that they can arrive at the “aha!” moment more often. It's addictive once you have had one breakthrough moment, you always want to strive for more. I think that’s what’s special with Penn students– they all have a thirst for learning and arriving at those discoveries. It’s a real pleasure to be with them in the classroom.
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