My ongoing practise researches and investigates parenthood, including; pregnancy, child birth, the relationships we have with our children, and considers that parenthood may not always be that of gaining a child but may be about losing them too.
I create installations as a visual interpretation of sensitive and personal experiences. I work across a variety mediums and disciplines using photography and film, painting, drawing and sculpture and the components can also be viewed as individual pieces.
I am an early career artist whose practice explores my fascination with fictional horror through primarily digital methods of making. Within the broader realm of horror, I have a particular interest in monsters, voyeurism, and depictions of female brutality, sadism, and masochism. Using my own image and body exclusively, my work presents versions of womanhood that transgress the bounds of what we are taught is acceptable, uncanny spectres of female experience that society is keen to repress. Here, monstrosity is configured as a source of damnation and agency, reflecting womanhood as complex and contradictory.
My own experience as a mother has been one of profound contradiction, of exhilarating highs and profound lows, of love and fury, comfort and trauma. I struggle to reconcile the fact that the greatest time in my life is also the one when it was the darkest, and that my body birthed a miracle but feels like a ruin. I am not as I was, but not quite sure what I am now; I’ve yet to turn into anything resembling the gargantuan mother archetype we’re fed, and too much of the old Jess remains for me to consider myself someone new. I have been transformed, reborn, reconfigured using the old parts. Some days those new parts feel like they were made of steel, making me infinitely stronger than I was, and other days that steel bites into my flesh, broken limbs fused back together suddenly failing to bear my weight.
Motherhood is a monstrous condition; it is incredible and disturbing, beautiful and completely fucked up. Like monstrosity, it is transformative, and for the woman-monster, this transformation is a source of both agency and damnation, strength and weakness. My work since my son is in part an attempt to reconcile the contradiction inherent in my own experience of motherhood, and to bridge the divide between what I am and what we are told a mother should be.
Experiencing pregnancy for the second time has greatly influenced my work, causing me to reflect much more closely on the process of bearing a child. There is the strange bodily awareness and attempts to reconcile this cavernous space that exists within me, and evocations of my own paranoias as I imagine this space as a place of both hope and doom. I like to think there is also some absurdity when one looks at a ridiculous, bulbous woman, or my lady-giants, but there is also the tenderness of the nets that keep the babies close to her body, or the way a stomach is opened up to sate the curiosity of the smaller figures who peer inside. There is the sorrow of the figure on the bridge as she surveys the fallen before her (a mediation on periods in history where the practice of fallen-mothers ending their lives and the lives of their offspring was not only a grim expectation, but an act of redemption), and my attempt to see a ruin as a place of beauty and life.
I am a contemporary painter living and working in rural New Hampshire, where I live with my husband and two sons. As a child and an adult, I have lived on all three coasts and in between, and traveled extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Now I live in a small New England town. Much of the reason that I live where I live, see what I see, and think about what I think about, is because I am a parent. Being a parent has influenced my work by influencing the choices I have made about where and how to live. These choices, in turn, present different roads for my artwork and for my professional career as an artist than would be the case if I did not have children. Many of my artist colleagues are also artist-mothers whose situations are similar to my own. We are finding ways to work together to create opportunities for ourselves well outside of the usual “art world” venues.
Painting is an essential part of who I am, and I have continued to develop my work, exhibit, and sell whenever possible. I began painting in oils in college and continued until my first pregnancy, when I switched to acrylics. This was the first example of the many times that parenthood and art needed to find new ways to coexist in my life!
As a parent, I am always doing more than one thing at a time, and as an artist, I see no reason to limit myself to only one style or way of working. Most of my work is not explicitly on the subject of parenthood or reproduction. But it shows up again and again in different ways and in different series. Sometimes it’s visceral—like Lupa, a wolf with two babies. The painting is on loose canvas, nailed to the wall, with slashes from her claws. Sometimes it’s joyous and chaotic—like Strong Nuclear Force, a dancing woman with four legs and a baby under each arm. Some are mysterious—like Inside, Mothers Are Dancing, which hints at the nature of mothers together. Some are more remote—even elegiac, like The Minivan Series.
It’s always been important to me as a parent to set an example for my boys of what women really are—separate individuals with their own lives, their own work, their own dreams, their own futures—not just the mothers who take care of them. At the same time, raising my children is all-consuming and wonderful. As my boys grow up, what they need from me grows and changes. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that reflected in my work.