This body of work explores the archetype of the mother/child relationship.

When I first became a mother, I found myself in an entirely new world of vacillating emotional and physical dynamics. Faced with a lack of time to go out and photograph, I turned my camera on myself, my daughter, and my mother as well. I became interested in exploring with the camera the complex and conflicting physical, psychological, and emotional dynamics of the parent/child bond I was now in: a world replete with joy, but also hidden dangers, fears, and inconsistencies. It was a world in which, like children’s fairy tales, nothing was as it appeared and reality was in a constant state of flux.

I found myself surveying the emotional, physical, and psychological reversals and slippages between our roles: how in one moment I felt in control of my and my daughter’s lives, and in the next as if my baby were caring for me, and I my mother. I am interested in using photography, not to document the daily lives of my daughter, my mother and myself but to investigate the emotional, physical, and psychological slippages and reversals between our tenuous roles, where the potential of the others exist even if in actuality they do not. I am also interested in the simultaneous sense of separation and identification -- physically and psychologically -- that we all continue to encounter, and our ongoing struggles for control. While I probe my own raw fears and anxieties of motherhood through this work, I hope to reveal the vulnerability and weightlessness of the mother/child kinship, a sense of being both separate and together. I employ suggestive rather than fixed narratives in order to highlight the state of flux that underlies our intertwined lives, and with it, the resolute existence of magic, fantasy, and fear.

Beyond the content of my photographs, I work in large format color. I am interested in using this format in order to punctuate the contemporary vein of my work and at the same time to reference art historical paintings of the Renaissance. Intrigued by representations of the Madonna and Child in 15th century religious painting, I reinvestigate the contradictory attributes of the mother/child bond in a secular, and autobiographical, setting. I use bodily gestures, garden-like settings, and starkly lit interiors as allegorical elements of my pictures, loosely reinterpreting religious themes of Renaissance painting through the lives of this present day three generation matriarchy.

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