When my practice got real
Though I graduated from Pratt in December of 2011, I don’t consider my current art practice to have started until 2019. Before that, I was pretending to be someone else entirely, without full knowledge of my authentic self, so the work I made between 2011-2019 feels like work made by a person I know really, really well. We’re almost the same, but that person was terrified of being unappealing to others or making statements. She was absolutely trapped in a self protective loop of refusing to reveal anything. But the thing about being invulnerable is that it means you are not granting access to anyone. Creating a veneer of beauty and appeal, while also keeping distance and limiting access to my inner self was my go to approach in all situations. I wanted to be sought after but utterly unattainable. It’s no wonder the art world’s manipulated popularity and inauthenticity felt so familiar; actors know when they are amongst other actors.
We spend most of our lives building up evidence of who we think we are and fortifying our positions and perspectives. But a funny thing happens when you have children, they reveal who we actually are if we’re willing to accept the version of us that lives in their minds, shaping them, is truer than perhaps the version we’ve constructed for ourselves. I believe this is why so many marriages struggle in the first 8 years of parenting. Yes of course there is so much extra labor and so much mental load and new roles that bring stress to a marriage, but I cannot ignore how much having children disillusions us of the habit of faking it because we end up so exhausted, our veneers slip. Sometimes this slippage shows a foundation built on falsehoods that can’t last under pressure.
The first piece in the gallery is about this idea. The text pieces are breastmilk on St. Armand’s Canal Paper, paired with a diptych of cement milk bag sculptures. The sculpture has two titles, “you can lean on me/don’t turn the lights off without looking at me,” because I wanted to express that the two pieces are in a dynamic marriage. So much of success is the ability to recognize the dynamics you are caught in and responsible for and being able to adapt or shift course before damage occurs. But we’re also taught that people don’t change. We all go into each stage of our lives with expectations that comes from experiences and society, but only a portion of us actually spend time processing those expectations on a deep enough level to leave us prepared for the possibility we could be utterly wrong about who we or our partner will be in moments of great difficulty or ease. Instead we make a lot of assumptions and hope for the best a lot.
My veneer slipped hard when I had my second child. By the time she was 4 months old I was requesting mood stabilizers for my then misdiagnosis of bi-polar II. I had never needed medication before, but I was drowning, full of rage all the time. At the time, I didn’t know I was deep in autistic burnout. The meds helped me not cry as much, helped me feel things slightly less, but I was far from stable. And because I never had any time to get there, I had to give up my studio space. This loss of autonomy was so bad for me and I felt nothing but demands and an inability to regulate at all because I couldn’t even make the art I had been making. All I was doing was pumping milk to boost supply for a baby that would never sleep and never wanted to be with anyone else. The sound of the pumps haunted me and I remember telling a friend in December of 2019 that I wanted to collect a bunch of pumps to make a sound piece. She thought I was crazy because my work wasn’t anywhere near this kind of conceptual work. But I realized that I was done appealing and worrying how the work looked. It’s funny that it happened in my art before it happened in my skin. It would be another two years before I cut my hair off and fully unmasked physically. I havent been able to disconnect myself from my studio trajectory since I began my Low Supply body of work.
My freezer is still full of other women’s expired breast milk stashes, which I collected from mothers who had kept it months, years, even a decade after it was pumped. They couldn’t bring themselves to throw away the only tangible thing left from an incredibly intimate and formative, but transitional, act of bodily devotion. I understood and told them I would make it permanent. I would paint with it and burn the milk onto the canvas, tanning it depending on the fat content of the milk, specific to each mother. I painted a lot of boobs. I still have the last of my piddly supply as well. And my nursing chair, which I am planning to reupholster in breast milk burned canvas, hopefully before mother’s day this year.
Our shed is full of pumping and bottle parts still, awaiting sculptural dreams to be fulfilled. The pumps are waiting to be put back into let down mode, to sing their songs of unnatural suction, each at a different pitch, and orchestra of anxiety. Though the last of my milk is dried up, my body has not yet returned to my full possession. I think I have to wait until menopause for that maybe, and with it, the meeting of yet another self, another deep version finally able to surface from under the male gaze. I already know she won’t have a single fuck left to sew.