On March 27 2020, two weeks after the Covid-19 lockdown began, I gave birth to my son Quill. As a way to process my experience of motherhood, the isolation of life in the pandemic, and my own changing relationship with nature, I began taking photographs in nature with Quill, and to use my breast milk as a medium. Objects are printed using breast milk instead of ink. Sometimes I paint with the milk using a brush. Once the milk has dried on the paper, the paper is ironed and the images appear as ghostly, singed shadows. In combination with embossed objects, the images have depth and dimension, and may then be paired with photographs, or torn, collaged and photographed in situ.
Motherhood in the time of lockdown has been a period of magical isolation, of escape into a new fairy tale, encompassing beauty and dark uncertainty. As this period of isolation stretched into fall and the wildfires took hold, filling the air with smoke and burning hillsides and communities, I found began to find new parallels. The singeing of milk drawings and prints to reveal patterns, the tearing and rearranging of these burnt images into new forms somehow mirrors the transformed landscapes around me in northern California, and the need to find personal renewal and transformation in the process of becoming a mother.
