I am a South American women artist and mother. I believe that one of the most important art roles is to make people think and reflect about unpleasant subjects and situations that would otherwise be forgotten or passed by. In my artwork I attempt to address those delicate subjects bringing up themes such as clichés and motherhood, contradictions of the feminine universe, constructions of gender and sexuality. I make my artwork with a variety of media that goes all the way from traditional painting and photography to perishable elements and installations. Currently I am privileging the use of pink as the beginning and end of my creative process, subverting the notions of beauty and grotesque.
Cried Milk (2018 - present)
Cried Milk uses data collected from a smartphone app to visualize what it looks like to exclusively breast pump for twelve months. Each visualization represents one month of data. The blue rings represent one hour, the change in value tracks the hours of sunlight and darkness, while the change in saturation indicates broad weather patterns (sunny versus cloudy). The straight lines each represent one day and the yellow circular bursts represent each 30-minute pumping session. The size of each circle correlates to the quantity of milk collected. This project connect to broader cultural conversations about motherhood. As infertility rates continue to skyrocket, many women experience motherhood through a similar, clinical lens. My hope is that this project gives voice to the millions of women who have struggled to become mothers and honor the under-valued labor of motherhood.
The Shape of Your Sounds (2017 - present)
Using audio surveillance technologies provided by a commercial baby monitor, I capture my baby’s cries and translate that data into visual shapes. The sound waves loop back on themselves in a 360-degree rotation. The result is vaguely reminiscent of the shape of a flower; each burst of sound looks like a petal. The initial purpose for this project was to try to find visual patterns that could be more easily interpreted. However, I quickly realized this was a fool’s game; the visual patterns are as indiscernible as his sounds. Therefore, what remains is a visual record of a moment in time; a beautiful reminder of those sleepless nights when the world was comprised of just my son and myself.
Sleep Regression (2016 – 2017)
“Sleep Regression” is a series of intimate works that were painted in the space of nap times and record the moments I watched my son while working in my home studio. The paintings’ small size and blue palette reproduce the video format and color, mimicking the tension between the close, private space of sleep and the distance created by the act of surveillance. The effects are eerie and disturbing images of rest. Lingering in the unconscious state of sleep the baby’s body looks lifeless. Are these representations of a sleeping child or a fetus? These works are thus unusual documents of baby’s first year of life–odd surrogates for the family photo album.
The gray-scale paintings, on the other hand, reinforce the reference to the sonogram, creating layers of distance. The painting series thus portrays an interesting paradox: the increasing stylistic abstraction chronicles my catharsis after years of fertility struggles as I move further away from my past sorrows, yet the works also reflect a turn inward and becomes more specific to my body (womb) and more private. The delineated forms in black, white, and grey look like the thermal imaging of a birth–drapery resembles the uterine wall, a dark ground morphs into a vaginal opening.
Nothing can prepare you for parenthood is a phrase often shared with a knowing half-smile that belies the over-exhaustion in the wake of superiority (or is it pride?) . Replying with hollow grins, I secretly wanted to smack every single person who uttered that phrase. And yet, they were right. For the record, also totally justified in their self-satisfaction. It turns out that something as ubiquitous and ‘natural’ as growing, giving birth to, and caring for your progeny has a long adjustment period. It’s not just the changing diapers, the schedules, the meal times, the money, the dressing, the undressing, the endless battle for sleep. It’s not just the negotiation of how your time is spent, and how to best care for your family, your home, and your future. A year in, and I still don’t feel like I’ve joined the ranks of those we call “parents” or “mothers.” This series, made from moments stolen during the odd nap or distraction, is a reckoning and a tool. It’s an attempt to connect who I was with who I have become, now that my life is filled with the incessant though profound mundanity of clearing scraps of food from a high chair, finding matching socks, nursing, teaching, exposing, loving–performing the theater of life to an awed audience of one.
Bara would like other parents to identify with the impact that children can have on their lives or offer would-be parents a unique insight into an experience of first-time parenting. Her work is also a love letter of sorts to her main inspiration, her son, as the work she creates is not only about him but for him.
The short film “Matyas” is inspired by a Czech fairy tale “Otesanek” written by Karel Jaromir Erben. The Czech folk tale from the nineteenth century talks about a living, constantly hungry, wooden log which eats its mother and its father and then continues eating other people. The end of this enormous eating is brought about by an old lady working in the fields who cuts through its wooden stomach and all the people jump out alive.
“Matyas”, the story of the all-consuming nature of maternal love, talks about a single mother who is not unhappy but very tired. The mother struggles with her constantly hungry baby who, in an addition to the original folk tale, never sleeps.
The mother grows desperate as she tries to feed the baby with everything she can find in their home. Her milk is not enough, nor is porridge, fruit or vegetables. She gives him pork and chicken meat but nothing helps. Nothing she can find fills the baby, and he constantly cries and doesn’t sleep. Finally, after over 300 sleepless nights, the mother finds a solution to this constantly growing hunger. She takes a long shower and prepares herself: she shaves her legs and armpits, she washes her hair, she brushes her teeth, all so she can be clean and ready for her baby. She has, once and for all, realised how to fulfil her baby’s insatiable hunger.