Other Projects
One Year: Somewhere in Between (a Life in 365 Days), is a self-portrait of myself as mother through a compilation of an experience that I cannot reduce to images. The portrait needed to be more encompassing. I combined images of my daughter’s daily rest, a symbol of the radical rescheduling of my daily life, with fragments from emails from all aspects of my life to create an almost flipbook of what my life felt like: a non-stop slideshow of pieces of things that I could never quite catch up on or control.
This work needed to explore and reveal intensely dichotomous feelings about motherhood. The exquisite peace of her face and breath met the realization of the terror of her realness, and with it fragility; and my own aching loss: of self, normalcy, time, rest, nourishment, support, certainness. The pictures recall delicacy, frustration, beauty, anguish, hunger, exhaustion, love, anger, gratitude, melancholy, bliss. But the memories were banal too: nagging emails, overdue thank you notes, applications not submitted, dirty clothes, neglected dog, art not made. I wanted to lay bare, examining through exposure, some of the basic facts of my quotidian routine as an artist, mother, wife, adult – perhaps as a means of normalizing a common but somewhat concealed reality. This evisceration attempts to alleviate the mystery or shame of working and struggling at two important and self-fulfilling roles simultaneously. The resulting work, One Year: Somewhere in Between, takes the form of an artists’ book and combines these photographs with text fragments from the same period of time.