Good Lord, leave your Mother alone

I am both Mother and Artist and I can’t easily reconcile the two, nor do my two daughters intend me to. They have made that clear. For now.

We meet on a kind of battlefield, art and mother; my daughters and I. There is a constant push-pull between love and resentment. I’m sure I share it with every mother, or mother figure. This series explores our complex relationship in time that universally tested and deepened so many familial relationships. A room of one’s own just didn’t feel possible.

I always wanted to be a mother. I held a naive notion that I’d be a ‘natural’ one. It didn’t take long to feel like I was failing -daily- both my children and myself; one because of the other. I never expected to lose myself to motherhood, to lose my patience entirely. I never expected ‘maternal’ to, at times, taste so sour. I began to photograph this experience, as a means to understand it and move through it, and so that other mothers perhaps see themselves in it. It’s not diapers and dirty dishes. It’s more about what it all feels like. Lonely but never alone… and still so full of love. The title tells of a longing for autonomy, but the process of photographing my daughters always leads me to love, expansion, and wonder. Away from resentment. Perhaps this is because I am doing the very thing that I have been begging to be ‘alone’ to do.

For the most part, the observational images of my daughters and their environment are reflections of my own state of mind. I am interested in how this pattern of reflection can be both intentional and unconscious. This is a question that comes up frequently in my process. The use of color throughout the work represents -in a lyrical way- the flush of hormones during pregnancy and birth, hence the title “Womb”. Sometimes it is as if I meet this beautiful chemical rush again through the things / moments / visions I am moved to photograph… and then again, in the scent of my child’s skin.

This ongoing project is made during, and in response to our everyday life -which since it began, has been at my in-law’s house in Florida, where we are living. Right now, this is ‘home’.