My current work views the world through the lens of a parent, simultaneously embracing joy, frustration, hope and fear. My work has always engaged in the liminal states of consciousness, through examinations of precipices, seams, folds, and crevices. In this new work, figurative elements of hands: my own and my children’s, become further lenses for exhuberence or despair. In some cases the hands obscure, and in others highlight. Both experiences are true, useful, and not mutually exclusive. I often feel that my arms are my most precious resource. They allow me to hold hands across parking lots, to carry bags, to prepare meals, to wash dishes, to gesture when I am intensely speaking, to draw, to write, and they are often full.
Precarious balance has always been at the crux of my work, and never has it seemed more true to my lived experience than as an artist and mother. The imagery included with the arms and hands continues to reflect the landscape, as I am habitually drawn to rock formations and fields of flowers. I connect this imagery to the world we inhabit, are desperate to protect, and which holds the history of generations. Through this work, I hope to examine and share the experience of motherhood, in all that is devastating, and all that is jubilant.
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.