This book documents an evolving work of conceptual art about the mother-child relationship begun by Mary Kelly during the 70s and exhibited in the 70s & 80s as an installation, with photographs and analyses of the material evidence of her baby’s transition from infancy to the beginnings of independence. It introduced an interrogation of subjectivity by using psychoanalytic theory and focusing on the construction of material femininity.

Conceived as an installation in six consecutive sections, Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document has been widely exhibited and intensely debated since its first scandalous appearance in the 1970s. Now, more than twenty years later, the Document’s initial challenge to conceptual art and its impact on the emerging discourse of sexual difference have taken on a new significance. For many younger artists and critics, the republication of Kelly’s artwork in book form will provide the opportunity to engage directly with the visual and intertextual strategies that spawned a generation of thinking bad girls.”

pp. xxi