When YARA + DAVINA became mothers within a month of each other, they didn't step back from their practice – they stepped forward together. The socially engaged artist duo began collaborating as a job share, determined to remain visible in an industry that too often sidelines mothers. Their work – which spans everything from poetry to bronze public sculptures – is rooted in play, accessibility and political intent, often exploring themes of care, identity, and who art is really for. In this candid Q&A, they reflect on making time (and peace) with imperfection, the pressures of doing it all, and why motherhood has only deepened their creative drive. How has motherhood influenced your creative process or career choices? Brian Sewel, the art critic, said in 2008 that "Female artists fade away in their late 20s or 30s. Maybe it's something to do with bearing children". Yes, motherhood has had a profound influence on our career choices. We became a duo after becoming mothers, and we had a deep wellspring of desire to nurture our babies and also nurture our art practice, not letting it fade away. Being a mum gave us a wider range of being and a deeper depth of what it means to be human. It filled us with more ideas, not less… we had more determination and more creative ideas than ever. In 2016, our hack on motherhood was to start collaborating as a duo as a 'job share'. We had been friends and admirers of each other's work for 11 years prior, and both of us became parents within a month of each other. We realised we both wanted to be present mothers but also visible artists. We literally started working together so we could work part-time but have a full-time practice between us. We are driven to make powerful, playful and fun contemporary art, alongside being mothers, to challenge ideas like Tracy Emin, who said, "There are good artists that have children. They are called men." We are good artists, and we are not only women; we are mothers! Photo credit: Alice Horsley What's been the biggest challenge in balancing creativity and caregiving? Time and some guilt! Quite literally, there is little time to parent and make art. But we were both determined to be part-time mums, part-time artists and full-time friends. This duo works because we both understand the limitations of our free time: we are always there to step up when the other needs a break, has sick children, or craves space for ourselves. It was almost like an intuitive dance, where we had become in tune with each other's outside demands and rhythm. As artists, we often have to travel extensively for work, which can put considerable pressure on our partners and be unsettling for our children. So guilt slips in every now and then. Luckily, we both support each other in those times and remind each other that to parent and care for others effectively, it is essential that we make time for our art practice and thus ourselves. With time, we hope our children will respect and understand the role art played in our lives and why we had to find a balance that worked for us as creative beings. We work together every weekday, and we always find ourselves talking and supporting each other with our parenting alongside making work. We both deeply feel that we were put on this planet to create great art, to push the boundaries of what art is and can be, and with whom it can be made and for whom it can be made. And we can do this while raising children. Photo credit: Alice Horsley Have you felt pressure to 'do it all,' and how do you navigate that? Yes, we feel it all the time, from ourselves as much as from society! One of our mottos that we tell ourselves is 'Good Enough'. We have talked about getting these as matching tattoos ( we love to wear matching outfits). Essentially, it is impossible to do everything really well. We need to prioritise what things need to be brilliant and what things can just be good enough. These priorities shift daily, creating an interplay between our personal and professional lives. Being a duo allows us to pick up each other's slack when needed. Photo credit: Nick Turpin What changes would you like to see in the creative industry to better support mothers? In 2016, we participated in a British Council residency at Portland State University titled 'Motherhood: A Social Practice'. We explored motherhood in the creative world, and our passion was to create more family-focused residencies and secure funding to support childcare. We wanted programmers to consider simple things, such as family-accessible residences, and work around term times. Things have dramatically changed since then, but we need to see more changes. People like Lizzie Humber and her daylight collective are doing amazing things, thinking about programming parent-accessible daytime culture. When we live in a time where Evening Standard art critic Brian Sewell says things like, "Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness.", women, in general, have a tough time, never mind mums! We are passionate not only about supporting artist mothers but also about working with and for mothers. Our public artwork, WOMAN - WHOLE, was created alongside, with, and for mothers on the Regents Park Estate, commissioned by ODAC, Camden. We subverted the idea of manholes, creating a series of bronze-cast covers embedded in the pavements of Camden. These permanent public artworks playfully remind us that, as women, we are whole. Photo credit: Hugo Glendinning

Warning: contains spoilers for Doctor Who episode “The Interstellar Song Contest” The Doctor and Belinda find themselves on Harmony Arena during the 803rd Interstellar Song Contest. But an evening of camp cosmic fun becomes a nightmare when horned aliens take over the space station – and the Doctor starts having strange visions. Spoilers ahoy. With “The Interstellar Song Contest”, Doctor Who might have given us its most blatantly self-selecting episode ever. When you hear the description ‘episode set during the Interstellar Song Contest featuring Rylan as himself’, you probably already know, broadly, whether it’s going to gel with your sensibilities. This puts a reviewer in a somewhat tricky position. I try as much as possible to take every episode on its own terms, and I’m very much of the view that Doctor Who contains more multitudes than most TV series, so there is always a place in the show for big, silly, populist spectacle. That being said, this is probably the episode I was looking forward to the least this season. I have no affection for the Eurovision Song Contest, especially in recent years. And while Rylan and Graham Norton admittedly acquit themselves pretty well here, as with the first Russell T Davies era, the showrunner’s enthusiastic engagement with contemporary TV and British celebrity culture can feel awkward, even slightly cringeworthy. Not only does it instantly date things, but it actually makes it harder to suspend disbelief and engage with the stories – having the likes of Davina McCall doing their familiar schtick puts the show that much closer to our reality, which I find just makes me ask questions I don’t want to be asking. All that being said, the idea of Rylan being frozen in stasis and unfrozen every year to host the Interstellar Song Contest is… kind of delightful. So, in conclusion, “The Interstellar Song Contest” is a land of contrasts. Actually, Bart Simpson’s immortal line has rarely felt more apropos. There is a lot going on here, arguably too much. Writer Juno Dawson has said that Davies pitched the concept as ‘Eurovision meets Die Hard’, with disaster movie elements, and the episode broadly fulfils that brief – it’s a perfectly workable concept, and if it had simply been allowed to be that, it might have hung together more cohesively. Ironically enough, the Eurovision / Rylan parts of the episode broadly work. It’s some of the other elements that unbalance proceedings, and while it’s pointless to speculate about which ideas were Dawson’s and which were imposed by upper management, it’s hard to believe that a guest writer would have been allowed to independently include the first appearance of Carol Anne Ford as Susan Foreman in proper mainline continuity televised Doctor Who since 1983. The Doctor’s sudden, unexplained visions of his long lost granddaughter are an absolutely huge curveball to throw into the episode, and they immediately suck all the oxygen out of the room. For viewers who know the significance of the character – and the actress, one of the last surviving links to the program’s very first episode, more than half a century go – it’s likely going to be a massive distraction. Why is this suddenly happening, where is she, when will they reunite, and oh yeah, why hasn’t the Doctor ever gone back for her (a continuity scab probably best left unpicked)? Meanwhile, viewers who aren’t familiar with Susan, even accounting for last season’s oblique mentions, are probably just thinking… huh? Presumably she’s going to feature in the two-part finale in some way – her appearance here will be even more confusing if not – but it feels like kind of an unfair requirement to foist on what should be the fun romp before the season’s concluding fireworks. The other big aspect of the episode that feels jarring is the Doctor’s rage. We’ve seen the character in vengeful mode before, punishing characters in far more baroque and existentially terrifying ways for comparatively less serious crimes. But not only does the Hellions’ plan feel like a gratuitous raising of the stakes that isn’t really earned – surely saving the one hundred thousand people floating in space would have been sufficient – the episode doesn’t really map out a solid trajectory for the Doctor to arrive at the point where he’s enthusiastically torturing Kid. We know it’s not because he thinks Belinda is dead – he’s aware that the people in space can theoretically be saved. Later he awkwardly describes being “triggered” because of the genocide of his own people, which just makes you wonder why trying to kill three trillion people wasn’t bad enough on its own, without the personal associations. The “ice in my heart” line is nice on paper, and delivered with appropriate contempt by Ncuti Gatwa, but it kind of implies that the Doctor is angry because he ended up briefly frozen in space himself, which feels weirdly petty. And the “I think it’ll be there forever now” at the end just feels bizarre. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! There’s also the issue that Kid has precious little juice as a villain. It’s unfortunate, as Freddie Fox has shown in Slow Horses that he can play a deliciously hissable piece of garbage, but the character isn’t threatening enough to be an effective antagonist and his plan is too psychotically over-the-top for us to feel any real sympathy for his plight. It ends up feeling like a waste of a huge dramatic move – one the show can’t exactly pull regularly – to have the Doctor’s uncontrollable rage unleashed on some random sneering emo, and it then feels jarring for the episode to flip almost instantly back into romp mode with the peppy rescue montage. It also contributes to the feeling that the episode can’t settle on a consistent tone – like the moment where Belinda and Cora are interrupted by the Dugga Doo alien. In theory it’s a fun black comedy beat to puncture the tension, and the kind of thing you should definitely do in an episode called “The Interstellar Song Contest”. But then, after the amusing “where’s that” exchange, Belinda has a tearful emotional moment with Cora, and the score swells, and clearly we’re supposed to now be taking things seriously again, but the Dugga Doo alien is still audibly singing in the background. It’s a comparatively small thing, but it adds to the feeling that the production doesn’t have enough control over the tone. There are bright spots, of course. Gary and Mike are very likeable everyman characters – it’s fun that they’re both instantly smitten with the Doctor, and that they both find it unexpectedly sexy seeing each other being competent at their jobs. The songs could generally stand to be a lot weirder and more alien, but Cora’s final ballad is soaring enough to land the final emotional beat (although the presumably accidental subtext that this is the only legitimate way for an oppressed people to make their voices heard is a tad awkward). The still, silent shot of all the bodies floating in space above the station is incredibly arresting. The Doctor and Belinda bonding over Eurovision is cute, even if it feels like the third episode in a row where Varada Sethu doesn’t get a massive amount to do. The Doctor flying through space propelled by a confetti cannon is just the kind of camp excess this sort of episode needs. And of course, there’s the ending, which leads directly into the first part of the finale. The TARDIS lights going red, combined with the portentous tolling of the Cloister Bell, is more than enough to sell the mavity of the situation – arguably more so than Mrs Flood stage whispering about Vindicators – and the doors being blown inward is an appropriately fiery full stop. Onward to “Wish World”. I love a good show. Grape? Doctor Who continues with “Wish World” on Saturday May 24th on BBC iPlayer and BBC One in the UK, and on Disney+ around the world.