2021 - present
Collage + mixed media

I’m the mother of two children, both young when I started this work. Motherhood has been an amazing but complex facet of my life and I started this series as an attempt to formalize and structure some of that chaotic complexity.

This work looks very different from the rest of my work, mainly because of its focus on stark collage. Collage is a very deliberate part of this work: each piece’s collage is made up of previous art that I made and then deliberately destroyed in order to use in these pieces. This, to me, is symbolic of how mothers are both willing and expected to take things that were theirs — their time, the food on their plate, their bodies, their lives — and break it up, restructure it, and give it to their children.

These pieces were started during the COVID-19 pandemic. Motherhood has always produced anxiety and worry (as well as joy) for many of us, and for many of us those things have been heightened during the pandemic. I plan to continue this into a series. My hope in this work is to use those feelings to drive the work but for the work to transcend the pandemic pressures and speak to the topic of motherhood before, during, and after the pandemic.