Blood Ties 1
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 vacilating 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. 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 exict even in in actuality they do not. I am also interested in the simultaneouls 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 weightlessnes of the mother child kinship, a sense of being both separate and together. I employ suggestive rather than fixed narratives in order to hightlight the state of flux tha tunderlies 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 film. 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 religious paintings, 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, loosly reinterpreting religious themes of Renaissance painting therough the lives of this present day three generation matriarchy.