Maternal Matters

The intersection of art, poetry, and motherhood; a multi-media exhibit at The Shop at Flywheel Press in San Mateo, CA.

Artist statement

My intention is to coax feminine energies out of their centuries-old oppression by exploring the quintessential embodiment of femininity: motherhood. The divine nature of the feminine is to create and nurture creation; just as life on earth evolved out of our sister the ocean, dark and wet like the womb. This collection of poetry acknowledges the light and shadow sides of making and raising humans by taking a heart-centered perspective on maternal sacrifice. By seeing the unseen, specifically the woman as mother, we hold space for her to birth new ideas, inspiring women to take back their power--not just in birth but in life.

“Words on Whites”

Gallery description:

I am a writer but I have terrible handwriting. I am a mother but I am neither quick nor skilled with laundry. My whites are stained and I still love white clothing. At any give time, you will likely find piles of laundry, sorted and unsorted, in my bedroom as I divert time I could spend on household chores to writing and reading and mothering. It made perfect sense to hand write verse about motherhood onto clothing and linens worn and ruined by my daughters and I. My undone laundry is the canvas for my work.

“Womannequin”

The Womannequin was born from the desire of two mothers with daughters to openly discuss how society capitalizes on female bodies.

My co-creator, Jacquelyn, and I wanted to use her, this sculpture of a woman's body, to discuss two multi-billion dollar industries sharing women as their common denominator: the beauty industry and the business of being born.

We have adorned Womannequin with magazine imagery to explore society’s treatment of the sacred feminine. The fun of fashion and the art of beauty resides alongside the objectified female who is sliced and diced, her flesh and her photograph, to measure up to the media's idea of what a woman should be, which is without question, different and better than who we are. Namely, younger, prettier, skinnier and sexier. (But not too sexy or we risk the label of slut!) While we feel inspired by many empowered and creative females profiled in today's media, these pieces are juxtaposed by advertisements for weight-loss drugs and age-defying nip/tuck treatments, leaving us marginalized and confused.

We affixed Womannequin with our own personal objects to represent advances in modern medicine that are empowering like the ovulation test and pregnancy test, invasive like the insulin syringe, and careful like the weigh-ins. Science has opened miraculous windows into the womb using lab tests and sonograms, but the results are often interpreted using subjective numbers as the only benchmarks, resulting in misdiagnoses that fail to take into account the whole person. This fear-based culture turns a natural physiological process into illness and birth into a medical emergency, numbing our glory along with our pain.

While the businesses of beauty and birth often use pressure and fear to sell and "save" us, we celebrate femininity as something that is not inherently flawed as we were taught by patriarchy, but rather, inherently perfect. As we silence the critics, internal as well as external, we learn a new way of seeing—and loving—ourselves.

“Filtered/Unfiltered”

Gallery Description:

Like many a modern parent, I photograph my children every day using my iPhone. I curate select images for my blog and Instagram, hence the square orientation. The hard truth is that I am a technology addict. In this piece I seek to embrace my addiction and put it to good use by making something beautiful for my children to keep. I want them to understand who their mother was while they were young (and why I could often be found behind my computer or phone), in hopes that this information will ultimately bring them to a deeper understanding of where they came from and therefore who they are.

The title comes from the photographs, which are filtered, and the words, which are unfiltered.