My work this year is an attempt to deal with, and find humor in, my situation as a single mother. By appearing in my images multiple times, or once surrounded by multiples of my son, I hope to visually communicate that I am his sole caregiver and therefore pulled in a million directions. It is also my hope to convey a sense of liminality through my images, as I believe that I am in a liminal state between where I was, or want to be, and where I have to be.
I started out wanting to document some of the lonely and overwhelming moments I frequently encounter since being left alone in the parenting world. I pieced my images together in Photoshop, but none of the "mes" were interacting with each other. As a result, my first images were lonely and depressing, and almost depicted my child as more of an emotional burden than anything else. In addition, I was over-planning my shoots, separating them from my everyday motherly routines, and they were actually causing me to need a babysitter to keep Henry in the next room, so that he wasn’t part of what I was doing until it was his turn to be in front of the camera. That was not what I wanted at all.
As the semester progressed, I encountered a lot of technical difficulty in piecing my images together, and I was kind of forced by a dead computer to take a different approach. I started making my shoots more organic, taking pictures with a remote while going about my daily routine and interaction with Henry, and I began to physically cut and paste my images together, turning my photographs into collages. This allowed me to truly make my work about motherhood rather than acting for the camera, and I feel that the collages are functioning as a better metaphor for liminality than pristinely Photoshopped images would. They are also better able to communicate that, even though I’m the only parent, I have fun and I love what I’m doing.
I have struggled with this work all semester, and I continue to do so. I would love to make something that is visually beautiful, and these collages certainly aren’t. But they are about my life, and that isn’t exactly beautiful right now either. However, at the end of the day I come home to a person that loves me unconditionally, and I love being his mom, so I’m embracing the situation and embracing this work and I hope that it shows through my finished images.
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