In my current body of work Made Especially For You, I am addressing the problem of diminishing caregiving roles to something insignificant in art, culture and society. I am thinking about how domestic maintenance work is gendered―unpaid care labor, the mental load and childcare is most often assigned to women. I am reflecting on the loss and lack of community-based caregiving systems in Western societies, where the responsibilities of nurturing could be a shared weight. In a compassionate way, I am mourning the lack of systemic support this causes. By invoking this in my work, I am also addressing how capitalism has individualized and isolated caregiving, further devaluing its role. Also, I’m thinking about assumptions made about artists who become mothers, how work about motherhood in the art world is treated and how the use of craft or domestic mediums is devalued.

The series of 21 silver gelatin photographs titled Yard Work also speaks to the loss of community based systems of care. In so much of our discussions about motherhood, we lack the context of our evolutionary ancestry and forget that “hunter-gatherers live communally in camps of 25-70 individuals, thus babies are virtually never alone. Childcare is proximate, sensitive, and responsive (Chaudhary, 2023)”. In contrast, in Western countries like the United States, mothers are isolated and categorized to either be “working moms” or “stay at home moms”, as if full time mothers who don’t have a paying job cannot earn the title “working”. Elena Bridges writes that “the real bummer of modern society is that we have made these things so incompatible, and I think the fight should be about how to reintegrate them: how to encourage communal living and extended care networks in our neighborhoods, how to integrate children into our social lives and into our work…(Bridges 2024).”

In the making of the photographs, I positioned myself and my son in the yard spaces of mothers in my community. The yard is the space between private and public, the border where things confront each other and start to blend―reality and facade, perfection and imperfection, “working” and “stay at home” moms.  Their bodies and our bodies interact around a chair in the space as we mourn systemic loss together and imagine what a new, post-capitalism type of “village” might look like. It is not a documentation of my village―rather, referencing the labor it takes to build your own support system and maybe imagining a future where women are supported and cared for in a community that values their labor. Also, this type of image-making indicates a recent shift in my art practice―as my son has grown older and more independent,  I’ve been able to re-embrace the slow practice of using film and printing in the darkroom.

 I place domestic artifacts and quilted pieces in traditional frames, indicating the connection between the domestic and art spaces. Using the embroidery hoop as a very large frame on the wall rather than a tool implicates the work and its history as Art, and questions when art work and carework is deemed finished or enough. 

I am thinking about what it means for caring mediums to be taken from the landscape of the domestic space and re-housed into the art gallery and art conversation; the broader implications of bringing domestic crafts into art spaces.  How are domestic forms & gestures—traditionally seen as craft or “women’s work”— involved in and part of the fine art world?  Can a gesture be art? I join the conversation around blurring the line between what is considered “craft” and what is labeled “fine art.” By placing traditionally feminine mediums into high art contexts, I am asserting their value and disrupting the historical marginalization of women’s assumed roles. Seeing care work and artwork as aligned helps dismantle the separation between domestic life and mediums traditionally seen as "domestic" from the realm of "high art." 

Much of my work is about the physicality of motherhood. The body is an always functioning tool in the role of Mother and that role is carried into the artwork via performance and photography. In this season, I lean in and accept myself as a tool in motherhood and in my art. I work in collaboration with the camera which is also carrying out a functional role as a tool to communicate visual information. I perform gestures alone with the camera, and eventually for the viewer.  I find that I am choosing to let my body be just that tool―to represent a universal experience, to document the story of the Mother’s body, one that is far from identical from mother to mother but in which there are strong emotions and gestures that are no doubt connected across the board. It’s not about my experience specifically―the work is informed by it rather than directly referencing it. 

Bed Rest is a performance in which I explore bodily gestures, motherhood, care work, and the toll or effect these factors have on the changing, resilient, adaptable female body. The images are made using a camera mounted above my bed, where I performed a variety of gestures I have been making with my body on a regular basis since becoming a mother. In the gallery lives a physical bed and mattress, on top of which the resulting stop motion video is projected. The bed frame sits on a rug of artificial turf, connecting the piece to its use in my practice, and almost as if inviting the viewer in to take a rest there. The fabric mimics a projector screen but brings its natural texture and wrinkles with it.  The work becomes a video performance piece that plays as the viewer watches the figure writhe around on the bed from gesture to gesture, unable to find a place of rest. The body is sometimes whole and sometimes fragmented and lost over the edge of the bed. The video plays in a loop so the installation is continuous. 

The gestures of care performed on the bed reference the sensation of never really being physically alone but still experiencing intense loneliness within the multifaceted role of Mother. Like in a factory, these mundane motions of motherhood become familiar, part of muscle memory from the repetition. These gestures indicate the changes I have experienced, how I have lost some muscles and gained others, and my brain has built a new group of tactile memories after suffering from severe short term memory loss for over a year due to sleep deprivation. I perform these motions alone with my body to reference the lack of a village and the resulting loneliness and solitude of experiencing these shifts. “It takes a village not only to raise a child, but to support a parent (Ricketts, 2024).”  The work also questions what gestures are “assigned” to women (and who is assigning them) through this lack of structural support and the societal degradation of the village.