Held, Not Spoken
Light and sound installation
My work explores motherhood, care and identity, and how these experiences are shaped by social expectations and emotional labour. I am particularly interested in maternal ambivalence — the coexistence of love, exhaustion and loss — and how idealised views of motherhood often overlook these contradictions. Grounded in lived experience and feminist thought, my work responds to the ongoing misalignment between societal expectations and the realities of care.
This light installation explores the psychological experience of motherhood through a sequence of illuminated cubes. Built around repetition, interruption and endurance, the work reflects the ongoing demands of caregiving. Fragments of text appear and disappear within the space, suggesting thoughts that are rarely fully spoken. These shifting messages reflect the strain of holding conflicting emotions that often remain unacknowledged.
Light moves between brightness and darkness, gradually revealing and concealing the work over time. This shifting rhythm echoes the uneven visibility of care and emotional labour in everyday life. A lullaby plays throughout the installation, creating a sense of familiarity and comfort, before being unsettled by fragmented light and language. Rather than offering resolution, the installation invites reflection on what is seen and what remains hidden, opening space to consider care, expectation and the complexity of maternal experience.
All That Remains
This work transforms fragments of my former self into symbols of motherhood’s complexity. Each nappy is constructed from my own clothing — garments that once carried memories of who I was before becoming a mother. Cutting them apart became both an act of mourning and transformation, revealing the shifts in identity and quiet losses that often accompany maternal experience.
The nappy emerged as a powerful metaphor, reflecting how mothers are often overlooked, much like something used and discarded. At the same time, it speaks to endurance and irreversible change. Once used, a nappy cannot return to its original state, just as the body and sense of self are permanently altered through pregnancy, birth and caregiving.
The process also draws attention to the hidden and repetitive labour embedded within motherhood — acts of care that are constant, yet rarely acknowledged. Learning to sew and construct these forms became an extension of that labour: a repetitive practice carrying both tenderness and exhaustion.
Through these works, I invite reflection on how society values motherhood, identity and the invisible labour that sustains others. Suspended between tenderness and discard, love and loss, the nappies embody the emotional ambivalence that defines much of the maternal experience.
Out Of Place
I use performance as a method of processing and working through ideas, allowing meaning to emerge through action rather than predetermined outcomes. During this performance, materials belonging to my child are manipulated, worn and reassembled, using the body as a site through which maternal experience can be explored.
This photographic series examines the shifting boundaries between selfhood and maternal identity through my interaction with my daughter’s clothing. The garments function as intimate and emotionally loaded objects, holding traces of growth, dependency and care. When stretched across the adult body, they appear strained and displaced, creating a sense of tension and unease.
This act of inhabitation reflects the emotional and psychological merging that can occur within motherhood, where distinctions between self and child can become increasingly blurred. The work explores the identity shifts and sense of loss many mothers experience after having a child, alongside the ongoing process of renegotiating who they are beyond motherhood itself.
Balancing vulnerability with moments of playfulness, the images capture a process of both becoming and undoing, where identity is shaped through proximity, care and loss.
