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.
Seeing and acknowledging what we see has an ethical dimension. I use photography to
make things visible and to reveal experience or spaces that we might not otherwise have access to. A sustained focus on space, gender, and the body is central to my work with photography. Lactation rooms are everyday spaces that embody deeply felt subjective experiences of motherhood. Symbolically and materially, expressed milk is a substitute for the mother’s physical presence and emotional intimacy when separated from her child. Photographs in my series “Milk Factory,” offer insight into women’s personal experiences, the maternal body’s status in the workplace, and ideological contradictions inherent in modern parenthood and government policies. The photographs are named for the diverse professions of the pumping women. The solitary pumping rooms take on collective power through the accumulation of photographs.
Bodies of Work, a group show curated by Corinne Botz, considers maternal experiences, with works by contemporary artists Marina Berio, Patty Chang, Lenka Clayton, Jamie Diamond, Nona Faustine, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, and Cao Yu. The artworks are stylistically diverse and incorporate a range of approaches, exploring inter-related themes including the body, time, politics, love, attachment, and separation. Normative and coherent ideals of motherhood are challenged, and the maternal is considered as a vital political force.
There has been a surge of artworks, books, and articles about motherhood over the past few years. To paraphrase a recent Paris Review article by Lauren Elkin, motherhood is finally being taken seriously in wider arts and a canon of motherhood is beginning to take shape. The subject of motherhood is urgent in the current political climate where there is a need to guarantee women control over their bodies. Women have begun to speak more candidly about health issues and biological processes that have in the past been cloaked in secrecy. Recent news articles have revealed bias against pregnant women and mothers in the workplace, and in spring 2018 the United States stunned the world when it declined to back a seemingly uncontroversial resolution to support breastfeeding in underdeveloped countries. For much of art history the subject of mothers were represented by men. Earlier generations of female artists often chose a career over motherhood or steered clear of explicitly addressing motherhood in their work because it was dismissed.
In this exhibition, maternal experiences, both overtly and obliquely, are transmitted into works that challenge preconceptions about being a mother and artist, while acknowledging the continued lack of resources and obstacles. The artists in Bodies of Work contribute something new to representations of motherhood, and offer an opportunity to delve deeper into the multiplicities that shape us.
In 2015, I became a mother. I was prepared for the grueling labor, and sleepless nights, but the loss of my sense of self can as a surprise. I had no time to think and I began to feel like a shell of a person. My early days of motherhood were alienating and awful as well as sentimental and dear. I began to see myself as defined only by a relationship. I felt that my son was an appendage of myself; the embodiment of self and other. It was hard to accept that he was a growing, changing person while I was to remain forever split. When he is near my thoughts are entangled around him and when I am away I cannot seem to be the person I was before.
A child is how we remain on Earth; they are our legacies. As I see my son grow I feel my time begin to speed up; I feel my decay. When we think about birth we must realize our death. Motherhood is precious and raw; wonderful and dark.