Melissa Barber, the artist who has just completed our latest acquisition at Steven’s rooms at the Mater, talks about being a working artist mother and its challenges.

One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life is to be a working mother.  I am an artist and I work at home with a 10 month old baby, and my 3 year old is at Family Day Care a few days a week.  It of course has its rewards in that I can be at home with my children while still breastfeeding them, and they literally learn to crawl around you. The difficulty lies not in being an artist, nor the risk of my studio becoming trashed, rather the challenge is that I’m working at home and the distinction between home and work becomes, most of the time, non existent.

Touch wood, the girls are great with virtually everything in the studio. My younger daughter Amelie is still too young to judge on how she’ll be exactly, but Eva has proven to be remarkably  good. My paintings are large, therefore they consume a lot of space, their easels simply invite being tripped over and the paintings themselves are mostly very tactile – very intriguing for little fingers.  But I have to say that very few catastrophies have happened – if you don’t count when Eva smeared hair wax over one painting.  Somehow she knows that they are not to be messed with even though she’s constantly on the look out for other crimes to commit throughout the house, and God, like any three year old she is a repeat offender.

And for the paint itself she’s also pretty good.  You’d expect her to mix everything together on the palette or even paint the paintings themselves, but she hasn’t.

And then there are the wonderful painting and craft sessions that we have – her and me together.  The first thing I learned with these is that they are definitely something that requires your full attention. I quickly learned that this activity must be done in a high chair with the table attached.  If not, I risk poo brown paint all over her and the highchair. Besides she just wants to watch Mum do it all anyway!

The biggest disadvantage of working at home though and I’d say this for most businesses operated from home  is that it’s extraordinarily difficult to draw the line between the two; your head is completely wrecked trying to prioritise what needs to be done on the domestic scene and the then work one.  For example, you’ve got a pile of washing to hang out, the weather is great, but you’ve set yourself a goal to have a painting at a certain stage of completion.  Which is the priority?  The washing must sit there and then you realise that the girls have no clean pyjamas.  Little things like that just do your head in.

And one of the worst things is that other people have no idea what it means to work at home.  They drop in, they ring up, you get asked out ‘to get you out of the house’ (!^&$#@) or hubbie informs you his truck needs to be registered soon and could you please organise this.  The whinge goes on and on and on.

A friend of mine, another artist, once said to me to go with my instincts at the time. And to some point I actually do do this.  Each small incident/crisis, depending which way you look at it, requires a few seconds’ thought and I do in fact ask myself on the spot, what is the most important thing here?  This is my identity, my business and my livelihood, so the washing, well, it can just wait.

Provided my kids have clean pyjamas.