Load-Bearing
Grunwald Gallery, Indiana University, 2022.
Load-Bearing explores the entangled states of motherhood as an institution and the embodied experience of birth and caregiving. Working within the visual language of femininity, domesticity, and childhood, the work questions stereotypes of patriarchal motherhood and sanitized depictions of birth to open space for a more expansive phenomenological experience. Fantastical combinations juxtapose the primal process of birth with the consumerized spectacle of mothering.
The exhibition addresses the post-postpartum period: the reverberations of birth and the ongoing, cumulative depletion of caregiving. Hand-dyed silk sculptures embody fleshy fragments (breasts, belly, cords, organs, skin) morphing with armatures to blur the internal and external boundaries of the body. Skeletons of playground equipment create giant abstracted bodies, bent, upended, or toppled under the weight of domestic labor. Industrial, load-bearing hardware hangs precariously from fraying organza bows, making visible the weight and tenuous strain of care.
The pressures of caregiving find tangible form in the making process. Intense compression of silk creates a resist to plant-based dyes, marking surface textures suggestive of wear, stretch marks, and wrinkles. The fleshy, translucent tones are produced through strong decoctions of plants used historically for fertility support, birth control, and abortifacients: color-making as a symbol of reproductive agency.