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.
In 2012 I founded An Artist Residency in Motherhood — a structured, fully-funded artist residency that takes place inside my own home and life as a mother of two young children.
Artist residencies are usually designed as a way to allow artists to escape from the routines and responsibilities of their everyday lives. An Artist Residency in Motherhood is different. Set firmly inside the traditionally “inhospitable” environment of a family home, it subverts the art-world’s romanticization of the unattached artist, and frames motherhood as a valuable site, rather than an invisible labour for exploration and artistic production.
As the first artist-in-resident-in-motherhood I aim to embrace the fragmented mental focus, exhaustion, nap-length studio time and countless distractions of parenthood as well as the absurd poetry of time spent with young children as my working materials and situation, rather than obstacles to be overcome.
The following works are amongst those made during my tenure as Artist-in-Residence-in-Motherhood;
The Distance I Can Be From My Son
All Scissors in the House Made Safer
63 Objects from My Son's Mouth
The project is archived in full at www.residencyinmotherhood.com. On conclusion of my tenure in May, 2014 the project will be passed along to two new residents.
An Artist Residency in Motherhood was funded by the Robert C. Smith Fund and the Betsy R. Clark Fund of The Pittsburgh Foundation and a Sustainable Art Foundation Award, and supported in kind by Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse.An Artist Residency in Motherhood was exhibited at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in 2012, and documents and works from the project are currently being exhibited in Complicated Labors at University of California Santa Cruz, curated by Irene Lusztig & Natalie Loveless until March 15th 2014.