The history of western landscape painting is inextricably connected to ideas of consumption, ownership, and domination by a masculine vision over a maternally feminized land. In the nineteenth century, European artists such as Cézanne described painting their “motherland” as an “instinctual absorption in the bosom of mother nature.”[1] In the US, the artists of the Hudson River School developed highly formulaic canvases from which viewers could imagine experiences of heroic conquest, quiet occupation, and surveying ownership over a “virgin” landscape already transformed by economic and colonialist endeavors.[2] From the mid-1950s to early 1960s, Carolee Schneemann devoted herself to this genre. However, instead of viewing nature as passive or maternal, Schneemann saw an expressive lifeforce filled with its own power and agency. In rhythmic brushstrokes, Schneemann painted what she saw and felt directly, without any feeling of possession or domination.

In many ways, the treatment and fate of Mrs. Ramsay runs parallel to that of our natural world. Like an insatiable and greedy child, Mr. Ramsay quite literally sucks all the lifeforce from his wife. We often describe mothers and mother nature as “precious gifts,” but in reality, such definitions give license to treat both not as “a bowl of berries,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, “but an open pit mine, and the spoon a gouging shovel.”[7] Ultimately, I’m Not Your Mother wonders if mothers and mother nature were not considered gifts but powerful gift-givers, and this power belonging to everyone regardless of gender identity. In Death By Landscape, Elvia Wilk reveals that we are all already mothers full of reproductive capabilities. Referencing an interview with Sophie Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now, “If everything is surrogacy, the whole question of original or ‘natural’ relationships fall the wayside. In that sense, what surrogacy means is standing in for one another, caring for one another, making one another. It’s a word to describe the very actual but also utopian fact that we are the makers of one another, and we can learn to act like it.”[8]