Nostomanic

Since my children were born in the early 1990’s, my status as mother has been a defining identity.  Most of the time the label is willingly embraced, but it is frequently laden with cultural expectation and marginalization.  In this work I respond to these “pleasures and pains” of maternal experience, simultaneously indulging the exaggerated tenderness of a sentimental mind while resisting the expectation for me to do so.

The series title, Nostomanic, refers to those conflicting emotions contained in the maternal experience. The images begin with photographs of my children.  I operate in the contemporaneous moment, indulging my sentimentality by working with the image of the ones I adore.  Yet the photographic moment also contains the seeds of history, sprouting almost instantaneously to become past and loss.  The intentional deconstruction of these images embodies both desire and ambivalence of the maternal space. The transformation brought on by doubling and layering denies the betrayal of time, suggesting another proposition that contains facets of truth, desire, pride and regret.