Mothering in the time of the Pandemic - how have we done it? We have had varying degrees of lockdown around the world. In Vancouver, BC we had it pretty good comparatively. My family was locked down for four months, which I barely survived! How have families managed any longer with their sanity intact? 

Making artwork this year has been borne of necessity. It has kept me as sane as I could manage in the circumstances. Starting with the performative self-portrait, I began confronting the ideas that have always interfered with my role as a mother, but which crystallized with the pressures of lockdown. I found myself feeling like a bad mother most days, but I felt like a good mother when I vacuumed the stairs. It became very clear with the extra pressures of the pandemic, and the impossibility of maintaining that status quo, that I could not carry on with these outmoded ideas of motherhood. 

This recognition evolved into ideas of how mothers are bound to these 1950s ideas of what a mother is. How we are having to define and form what a good mother is in the contemporary world - in an intersectional feminist world. Using images from 1950s magazines, I have been creating imagery around mothers who feel bound to these old ideas. They want to break free.