Mother’s Day Flowers

I’ve been exploring the idea of mothers as givers of life and death in my own work for several years now. This notion comes from the writer Samantha Hunt, who upends the sentimental versions of motherhood by integrating the sobering idea of death. There are many ways in which birth and death intertwine. They are events that should exist on opposite ends of a pole but echo a certain kind of commonality in their mystery and significance. In becoming a mother, I had to face my own mortality and my children’s in ways I never did before. I became much more aware of the razor-thin line between life and death and that the joys of parenting are not exempt from this encroaching darkness.

Mother’s Day Flowers is made up of a series of sculptural photographs of my children and the Mother’s Day flowers they gave me.  Each piece is made up of several, layered images, offering a multitude of perspectives that spill onto and over each other and break outside the parameters of a traditional photographic frame.