Un-mothering

You told me to breathe when there was no air.

I will remind myself that you were too broken and too tired to teach me how to love.

For all the days that you left me on my own.

I repeat everyday, I see you, I hear you, I feel you.

It's not me. It's you who forgot everything.

1/2

Unknown archive, 13.5 x 8.5, 2021, Pen on found photography

What happens when our first relationship is formed within and around a person who is not able to love? Too fragile, too scared, too broken to be present?

What possibilities does this relationship hold when regarded as instinctive and innate, never to be questioned or attended to?

In this project, the artist re-examines the maternal bond, separation, and loss. Using found family archives as a vessel to reflect their deepest vulnerabilities around bonding, belonging, and rupture, they formulate their sentiments in a correspondence aimed for awareness and healing.

Through the process of reimagining the initial alliance to create a dialogue that otherwise would be impossible, the artist employs daily objects to reflect on their own displacement and uprooting. Objects coated with paper mâché denote the erasure of memory, and time as well as the narrative of the past that they embody.