Untitled, Caesura series, 2018-ongoing, Created with support from Canada Council for the arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council with funding from the City of Toronto.
From the Latin word to describe a pause or break within a poetic verse, Caesura examines the complicated framework of the mother-daughter relationship and its connection to memory. Through the process of raising two young girls, I catch glimpses of my own girlhood mirrored back at me. Moved by the quality of light, a texture or situation, I am at once transported back to specific moments in time. These “recalls” lead me to question the veracity of what I remember. This is complicated by the past meeting the present as my memories are reflected in my daughters’ gestures, actions, and appearances.
As an artist I bare witness to the mother-daughter relationship as it evolves, one that has moved from complete dependence on me as a mother to this newer semi-autonomous state of being. A situation that has become more complex as my family enters the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting restrictions. In this observation, I draw personal parallels with my own push-pull desire to be physically close to my children, while also yearning for a freedom of my own. There is a pause in the middle of the line and that line is flowing from me through to my daughters. At a certain point my children will no longer be attached to me in the same way that they were when they were younger. The pause is growing longer and Caesura is a way to explore these inevitable changes and the texture of the time within them.
Using large format, digital and instant photography, I combine portraits, still lives, and photos from my archive to produce sequenced pieces and individual images. By bringing these components together, I’m interested in creating a hybrid-memory, one that recreates elements of my past, while concurrently capturing the moments that unfold before me as a mother. The ambiguous narratives created omit the build up and undoing of the moments shown and are as fragmented as memory.
I see these as ordinary and fleeting scenes, brought together to reflect on intergenerational experience, the meaning of history, and familial understanding. At the forefront of this project is the need to make space for my ever-changing outlook of being a mother and an artist.
Observations from Isolation, from the Caesura series, 2020
Within this long-term series, a chapter entitled Observations from Isolation is being created as a response to mothering in the time of COVID-19.
