The mother takes a room and closes the door because that is what she needs. Inside, she is preparing for the live performance of mothering that happens elsewhere. The room holds what has to be done at a distance. She reads, watches a workshop, practises what to say, breathes on the floor, plans, does nothing. She builds capacity away from demand so care can continue. This is mothering. It is ordinary, and it is rigorous. She is inside, or sometimes isn't. It is whether-dependent.

The performance is private. It is for me. It is for my children. We are the audience. Not what is visible, but what is possible. How am I doing? Is it going well? What do we need right now? My children are the feedback. It is between us.

—Clare Fleming

For PHD candidate Clare Fleming, there is no hierarchy between modes of care and artmaking. As an artist who is also a mother in a disabled and neurodivergent family, Fleming draws on two bodies of practice: contemporary parenting methodologies, and documentation approaches of performance art. From the first come techniques — what to say, how to listen, when to withdraw. From the second come apparatuses — a lens, a recording, documentation. As an artist the activities of both collapse into one, her practice is mothering as performance.  

For the duration of the exhibition Rehearsals for Mothering the gallery will be closed from public access, and solely occupied by Fleming. The privacy of the room is functional. The work of rehearsal requires no audience but the mother, the artist, herself.

^{Clare Fleming (Pākehā) is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She holds a BFA from the Dunedin School of Art and an MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts. Fleming works across sculpture, sound, image and performance. Her practice weaves art and everyday life, studying the becoming subject as it is formed and reformed in relation to structures of power. She is a doctoral candidate at Auckland University of Technology, where her practice-led research approaches mothering itself as the performance, and documentation as what sustains the practice rather than what records it.}