It almost feels like I have spent the past two years in isolation. I’ve been consistently trying to navigate my artistic practice through intense waves of grief over the loss of my mum, infertility/miscarriage, and a fear of dying. Things have shifted in the last 4 months, with added postpartum anxieties, healing associated with childbirth, obsessive tracking of my baby’s feeds, breastfeeding struggles and COVID 19. With the COVID pandemic, there were increased anxieties surrounding my newborns health. Will my baby be okay? What if my baby gets sick? What about check-ups? Am I feeding my baby enough? what if my milk dries up and I can’t feed my baby? What if I get sick and can't feed my baby? Am I spending adequate time with my oldest child?
As a way to ease my anxieties, I started pumping breast milk. I would pump at 5:00 every morning after our first feed. I began writing thoughts or worries along with the date on each bag of breastmilk. I would then photograph the bags of breastmilk as a way to document life postpartum, anxieties about mumhood and life in COVID19. The act of pumping breastmilk and freezing was a ritualistic and meditative way for me to cope and eased anxieties around getting sick and not being able to feed my baby.
Postpartum anxieties are exacerbated by the times we are living in.
I’ve been a working artist, curator, community activist and teacher for more than 25 years, creating and producing intimate solo performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and lectures. My practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals, and single bathroom stalls. I’ve operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. I’m forever inspired by the rebel queers, renegade witches, and other dyke moms I run with, and bound to many brilliant artists, activists, spell-casters and healers. For many years I made performances that drew from my own experiences of trauma and transformation, intimacy and motherhood. More recently, I’ve experienced a shift in my practice, where my attention has turned to wider theoretical questions about the nature of performance itself to ask questions about when, where, how we perform - in theatres and galleries, on social media, and in our everyday lives.
For all loves never allowed to be.
Hard To Place is a true story about race, family and the child welfare system in post-war Britain.
Combining confidential, UK government documentation with archival and (auto)biographical photography, this series traces the experience of Joseph, an orphan boy of Nigerian and Irish parentage growing up in 1960s/70s London. As a “half-cast(e)” child, in England, Joseph was considered “hard to place” amongst the mostly white, adoptive families.
Joseph is my husband. On our first date he nervously told me his life story, continuously pulling at his sleeves to hide the ink of bad decisions made during his teenage years as a black skinhead. The little boy seen in Hard To Place is our son. The images in the book provide a visual alternative to the official, master narrative of child welfare that many mixed-race children are imprisoned by.
In 2010 during the months after giving birth to my son, I turned to the camera to work through a period of intense loneliness I had never felt before. Feelings of joy and love for my new baby came with equal sentiments of fear and isolation. This “post-partum” situation challenged me to make photographs within the spatial limits of our apartment and to visualize my entrance into motherhood.
During this time, my photographic practice allowed me to hold on to a creative aspect of my previous self that I felt was slipping with every diaper change and breastmilk-pumping session. Trust Your Struggle is a photographic essay that documents what is often considered taboo when publicly discussing the new mother experience: the isolation, hectic days, sleepless nights, physical pain and those rare, selfish moments.