Maternicity: The emotional component of the maternal role, specifically describing reorganization of identity from self to mother during the postpartum period.
For the first 9 months and then the following 19 months until now, I wanted to scream my experience, to tell everyone about this shockingly remarkable event that changed me forever, to shake the person standing next to me enough that they would feel the seismographic intensity of my new life paradigm shift. Instead, I spent 3 months quietly and methodically making paper from raw fiber, another year tying it all together, months collecting used diapers and dryer sheets, early mornings hand stitching quilts, sleepless nights in-between breastfeeding sessions printing lithographs, and generally obsessing over this drastic reorganization of my life. Creating my manifestation of maternicity, a natural pattern of narration.
This show acknowledges the fragility/stability of the human body, specifically in a maternal experience, nods to the excessive cultural codes of the feminine, attempts to decipher a personal paradigm shift, and follows it all by indexing physical and emotional work. Organized in variations of line and grid, the thousands of delicate attachments to hundreds of sheets of handmade paper echo the thousands of self evaluation sessions spent transitioning into this maternal role. Some works follow a diaristic documentary process indexing physical work. Others address only the intuitive remnants of emotions. All of the work draws conclusions about identity.
Giving birth to this body of work was like being reborn. I went into it one and emerged two, the person before and the mother after. Like a child, it is the product of process, the result of a long, slow process of minute developments, the drama of transition to delivery now a slightly discolored memory. I feel like I physically exude this deep physiological pattern of continuous subtle transformation; I’m slightly reshaped, slightly discolored, and after all this layering, possessed by a much greater transpersonal consciousness.
