Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood review – all of life starts here

“There is no more sombre enemy of good art,” wrote Cyril Connolly, notoriously, “than the pram in the hall.” Have kids, runs his supercilious maxim, and your creativity is well and truly screwed. The fact that great art has been made by parents for millennia seems not to have troubled him, nor the insult to those who give birth, or their babies. Not even, as this terrific Hayward Gallery touring exhibition shows, that procreation itself may be the vital inspiration.

Acts of Creation is riveting from first to last, an exceptional (and touring) anthology of contemporary artworks to startle, move and awe, all one hundred and more plunging deep into motherhood. It opens with an object of stirring mystery. Lying on a plinth is a form suggestive of a woman’s pelvic anatomy, delicate but strong, fashioned out of animal horns, twigs, steel and earthy red soil. Fine silver wires run between the cavities.

Wangechi Mutu’s sculpture probes at the quick of gynaecology, with its intimations of bone, fallopian tube and speculum. But its title is in fact Healing. It is a prayer for fertility and itself an outlandishly beautiful embodiment of fortitude.

This ideal start is paired with another, too, audible even before you enter the opening gallery. A newborn’s soft gurgles intertwine with an echoing call and response from its mother. But these sounds turn abruptly poignant when you come upon the installation from which they emit. Fani Parali reprises a neonatal intensive care unit incubator as a skeletal structure of cold hard metal; where the baby should be is its ghostly depiction in pencil instead.

A baby arrives slowly, the arduous labour enacted in sketch after painstaking sketch, the aesthetic midwifery of Ghislaine Howard. It alters the body, in the photographic self-portraits of Annegret Soltau, literally stitched and reformed. Even before birth, the miracle is strange. Susan Hiller documents her own pregnancy in 1977, within and without, in terse words and grainy photographs of her swelling stomach as an almost primordial topography.

This is one of many classic works in this show (one in the eye for Connolly). Here are Paula Rego’s brutally candid etchings of Portuguese women enduring the aftermath of backstreet abortions entirely alone, and a section of Mary Kelly’s celebrated Post-Partum Document, in which her son’s first words and attempts at writing are etching on slate.

Celia Paul’s painting of her son, Frank, raised by his grandmother, shows Frank filling the foreground and herself as the merest glimpse in a mirror. Scenes from Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series, which also run word against image, show a mother and daughter at the kitchen table with every kind of closeness and sudden standoff.

Superbly curated by writer and critic Hettie Judah, with exceptional knowledge and sensibility, this show sets forth as many new names as established stars. I loved Lea Cetera’s brilliantly epigrammatic hourglass, its curvaceous form extending into glass ovaries containing grains of sand that can never be dislodged. What a play on lost hours, stalled time and biological clocks. You Can’t Have It All is its title.

Leni Dotham’s Sleeping Madonna shows a photograph of the artist in red robes with a baby at her breast – self-portrait as a Renaissance archetype. Except that the image almost imperceptibly moves: the infant apparently dropping off then beginning to suckle all over again as the artist nearly collapses into sleep. His satiation: her exhaustion.

Judah uses wall colour to empathic effect: warm reds for the early years, sonorous blue for profound meditations on motherhood and the way it changes a whole life, gentle whiteness for a gallery concerned with loss.

This might be the loss of a pregnancy, a baby, or the child that never came in the first place. Elina Brotherus’s photographic self-portraits show the switchback through IVF in all its isolating anguish, including the bitterly expensive drugs, the artist injecting herself beside the ubiquitous yellow needle bin, the mounting two-week wait and the devastating plummet of the negative test.

How to be an artist and a mother? Marlene Dumas submits her world-renowned lone heads, in all their ambiguous watercolours stains, to her small daughter for cheering up with poster paints. Jai Chuhan tears herself away from the canvas to get down on her knees with her infant, in a chaos of brimming paint pots.

Billie Zangewa’s embroidered fabric collage – rather generously titled Every Woman, given the glamorous mother figure in jeans and high heels at the centre of the image – is surrounded by junk heaps of strewn toys. In her hand is a nameless silk scrap – literally Zangewa’s medium – as chewed by an infant.

What to make of this new world in which you live? The dull plastic glint of bottles and pumps fills the canvas in Caroline Walker’s anxious still life. The infrangible and never-ending bonds of maternity are played out in Chantal Joffe’s double portrait of herself, naked, seated next to her clothed daughter. Hannah Starkey’s photograph shows a mother trudging heroically through snow, shopping bags hooked over the yoke of a pole on her shoulders.

Bobby Baker’s Timed Drawings from early motherhood are captivatingly tragicomic. A drawing of crisps on the carpet done in five snatched minutes; her child’s soft nape after a first haircut; her own head suddenly exploding. Most affecting is a quick sketch in which she attempts a self-embrace: Comfort Yourself, all within 20 lonely minutes.

Mystery, profundity, love, grief and amazement: not a work in this show achieves anything less. And the absolute retort to the pram in the hall is the revelation of humanity in Rineke Dijkstra’s quietly respectful photographs of young mothers holding their babies within minutes of birth. Exhausted, visibly postpartum, some still bleeding, all courageous, proud and protective of the new life they have brought into this world.

• Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood is at the Arnolfini, Bristol, until 26 May, then tours to Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham (22 June-29 Sept), Millennium Gallery, Sheffield (24 Oct–21 Jan 2025) and Dundee Contemporary Arts (spring 2025).