Collection, digital print, 11x17”, 2020
Breastfeeding can be joyous; it can also be traumatic and women are not often given the guidance and space to process and reflect on that trauma. So much of mothering is now done solo, with little real life support and dialogue around the difficult feelings that motherhood can unveil. To become a mother is to disappear and reappear as a different person; it is not always an easy transition, at times leaving us in between, invisible, and searching for our new identity. It is easy to become overwhelmed and burdened by the needs and emotions of everyone we are meant to support. This body of work is about, for, and made with mothers in the hope of exposing the private struggles we keep hidden as we try to be bottomless reservoirs of love and stability even when we feel empty.
I started this project in January 2020 when I was struggling with breastfeeding my daughter because of low milk supply. There were a lot of feelings of anxiety and inadequacy and milk consumed my thoughts. The sound of the breast pump haunted me as I tried to boost my supply. I decided I needed to steep myself in these emotions in order to process them, embracing my own vulnerability instead of running away from it. If I amplified my own struggles in my work, I hoped other mothers would see themselves and feel validated. In my online mom groups I asked for donations of pumping and breastfeeding paraphernalia, pumps, and frozen expired breastmilk. I didn’t know what I would make but I thought I could transform my emotions by transforming the exact objects that brought me anxiety. I wanted to include the experiences of other mothers in this body of work and take their leftovers and hear their stories.
I began collecting breast pumps because I thought if I got enough of them, and turned them on all at once, I could make an installation that created a vacuum cacophony to mimic the sounds that were always in my head, making them available to those who had never pumped milk. I then began using donated silicone nipples as molds, casting with cement to signify the weight and burden I felt in trying to produce enough and be the best mother. I chose cement because it is heavy, pedestrian, a structural material, meant for supporting and strengthening, just as mothers do. The sculptures are solid but imperfect, imbalanced, can tip and teeter, threatening to break like a fragile mother who has been pushed to her brink.
Once I was comfortable with cement, I moved on to work with the expired frozen breast milk. A freezer stash is many things to many mothers. It is security, time spent, effort, struggle, each mL fought for, machine sucked from our bodies. Whatever the reason for pumping, the frozen bags of milk are heavy with emotion and hard to let go. But women gave them to me, almost all stating that they didn’t know why they’d kept the milk for months or even years after it had expired and their baby no longer needed it. There was an embarrassment, a shame in thinking keeping the milk was unique to them, a quirk or a weakness. They had no idea that other mothers felt the same, that they weren’t alone in their attachment to the milk. Many expressed relief and happiness that it wouldn’t go to waste, that it could be used for something; mothers always want to be useful and provide. So I painted with it to honor them and make permanent their invisible labor in producing the milk.
My color palette in both sculptural and two dimensional work hints at wounds, bruising and healing. The breastmilk, paint, and cement create a balance between soft and hard, organic and inorganic, weight and release, mirroring the soft natural breast and the hard plastic of the pump. Taken all together this body of work reveals a more nuanced, complex, and genuine picture of motherhood than the idealized version women have been sold for centuries.
