Soft Cover
Artists’ Books
Three Silhouette romance novels, sealed in wax. No aperture, no opening. They are meant to be held.
The source texts are from Harlequin's "Billionaires and Babies" and "Special Edition" lines, a genre that scripts motherhood as romantic destiny, caregiving as proof of a woman's worth, family as white, heteronormative, aspirational. Their covers, their plots, their idea of family is built on who counts and who doesn't.
The wax is not preservation. It is internalization. These scripts have been taken into the body, swallowed whole, hardened there. The tropes fossilize. The source becomes inaccessible, but the shape it made persists. Cover images ghost through the surface the way a stereotype operates: not quite visible, not quite gone. The word MOTHER surfaces on one of them, legible through the wax without being cut or applied. It announces itself from inside the encasement.
The pieces are hand-sized and warm. You hold them the way the original reader did. The material is closer to skin than paper. What you're carrying is the residue of a script about who gets to be a mother, and what that's supposed to look like, and what it costs to have believed it.