Mother, Mirror marks a fifteen-year collaboration with my mother as an active and engaged part of my artistic practice. Making photographs serves as form of connection and meditation on family mythology, matriarchy, and memento mori.
My mother was an avid storyteller and chronicler of family life; she followed me around with a camera earlier than I can remember. She was an outdoors-woman and a fisher-woman with a radical reverence for the natural world. My upbringing was mostly matriarchal, as my father left when I was too young to remember. I was the only child of a single mother; a latchkey kid raised with a village of neighbors and babysitters.
In my late twenties, we created our first long-term body of work together. We made work inspired by our grandmothers and great aunts—rebellious, spinster women who came of age in the early 20th century. Into my thirties and forties, we continued to create photographs inside and outside of long-term projects.
In her retirement, she spent her time volunteering for a local wildlife center where she rehabilitated injured and orphaned rabbits and squirrels. She nursed many litters of infant squirrels until releasing them back into the wild. The rabbits and marsh hares were much harder to care for, as only ten percent of orphaned rabbits can survive without their mothers.
Into her 60s and 70s, I photographed her and the animals she tended to, living and dead, as a reminder of the sacredness of life. In the Summer of 2024, we made our last picture together in front of a shading sky flower shrub in my backyard. She felt seen in front of my lens, and was made still, eternal, and safe, in my frame.
The more time passes, I see myself reflected in her, in our shared visage, lineage, and essence.
Mother, Mirror is a series of archival pigment prints made from medium and large format color negatives.
