MOTHEROTHER
Relaunch Event
@ Middlesbrough Art Week 2026
1st October 2026
The Auxiliary Project Space
MOTHEROTHER was relaunched at The Auxiliary Project Space on 1st October 2026 with a special event at Middlesbrough art Week (MAW). We celebrated the achievements of the programme’s first iteration with a synopsis from founder Sue Loughlin and learned about the brand new programme for 2026-2028. Hettie Judah (Curator, Writer and Co-Founder of Artworking Parents Alliance) recalled her connections with the project and gave a keynote mapping her take on the progress (or lack there of) in addressing barriers to art world participation for parents and carers. We also got an insight into strategies for entering the art world, the theme of Hettie’s latest book. Artists Claire Ong (MOTHEROTHER’s featured artist at MAW 2026) and Alia Gargum (MOTHEROTHER Support Recipient 2024) gave us personal tours of their works at The Auxiliary and we enjoyed hearing them reflect upon their experiences as artist parents and carers. It was wonderful to have so many participants on the day, such rich conversations and the opportunity socialise in a relaxed, honest and open environment. You can see more information about the individual guests below and find further resources and information by clicking on the buttons above.
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Sue Loughlin is a visual artist whose tactile sculptural work utilises contrasting materials to evoke visceral sensations and create narratives. Her work invites contemplation of the wider impact of political, ideological and socio-economic shifts upon women's autonomy. Works regularly reference the female body and the systemic failings which frame it as a fallible, disposable machine.
Motherhood, and the mental, physical and societal implications of this state have become recurring themes since Sue founded MOTHEROTHER in 2023. This Arts Council England funded research, curatorial and social practice project has become a methodology through which she navigates the unfavourable art world conditions experienced by artist parents and carers, supporting others to do the same.
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Hettie Judah is a writer and curator. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian, Frieze and The Times Literary Supplement, and writes a monthly column for Apollo magazine. Her writing on art can also be found in Art Quarterly, Art Monthly, ArtReview and other publications with 'art' in the title. Between 2016 and 2024 she was the chief art critic for the British daily newspaper The i.
Hettie is curator of the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood which toured venues in the UK between 2024 and 2025, before transferring to VISUAL in Ireland, where it ran until early 2026. The standalone book Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood is published by Thames & Hudson. Following publication of her 2020 study on the impact of motherhood on artists’ careers, in 2021 she worked with a group of artists to draw up the manifesto How Not To Exclude Artist Parents, now available in 16 languages.
She regularly talks about art and with artists for colleges, as well as museum and gallery events. A supporter of Arts Emergency she has mentored artists and students through a variety of different schemes.
As a broadcaster she can be heard (and sometimes seen) on programmes including BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and the BBC TV arts series A Life In Ten Pictures. Recent books include Tracey Emin (Tate, 2026), The Secret Lives of Stones (Laurence King, 2025). How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (Lund Humphries, 2022) and Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones (John Murray, London, 2022/ Penguin, NY, 2023). Her book How to Enter the Art World…After was published by Hoxton Mini Press in April 2026. She is currently working on a major book on art and women’s desire, to be published by Thames & Hudson in autumn 2027.
In 2022, together with Jo Harrison, Hettie co-founded the Art Working Parents Alliance - a supportive network and campaigning group for curators, academics, gallerists, technicians, educators and others working in the arts.
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Claire Ong is an award-winning Irish artist, living and working in Newcastle upon Tyne. She explores human language through multiple techniques and materials, primarily textiles, with methods encompassing screen printing, stitch and repurposed textiles.
Her work re-examines how political statements are laid bare when they are made permanent and context is removed. The resulting artworks present a modern narrative in a traditionally female medium, playing with repetition, innuendo and layered meanings, crossing between the boundaries of graffiti and fine textiles.
Claire was awarded the inaugural Newlight Summer Art textiles Bursary Award for State of the Nation, a substantial piece examining the caustic language and promises around the 2024 general election, and is a 2026/7 winner of Seaton Delaval Hall’s North East Emerging Artist Award presenting Uneasy Chairs, a work shaped by the hall’s history as a World War II overspill prisoner-of-war camp. Ong has exhibited widely, including at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; the Newlight Art Prize exhibition, Sunnybank Mill; the National Gallery of Scotland; and the House of Smalls, Edinburgh.
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Alia Gargum is a Libyan-British artist based in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. She composes her work through critical and personal exploration of politics and culture, focusing on her heritage through diasporic means. Metalwork, fabric and installation elements are reorganised, reused and transformed in an organic manner as part of the artistic process. Alia primarily uses hand-treated steel and adopted materials to depict signifiers of her past through a contemporary lens.
Alia’s work explores power dynamics that echo into personal relationships, with a focus on the history of North African region power structures. Themes of forced migration, exile and identity also converge in her works.
Alia was selected for New Contemporaries 2025/6, exhibiting at South London Gallery and MIMA, and was awarded a Henry Moore Foundation Grant in 2025 to create the Public Sculpture What I Remember About Libya in stalled at the Auxiliary Project Space, Middlesbrough.