Containment

This is maternal work: collaborative portraits of my children interacting with my handmade quilts against a burst of green growth. The images look at complex expressions of wildness and care in motherhood. They speak of aggression, containment and love.

Containment is maternal work: it includes photographs of my children and their friends interacting with my handmade quilts against a burst of green growth. The images look at complex expressions of wildness and care in motherhood. They speak of aggression, containment and love. 

In psychoanalysis, containment is the experience of being held: kept whole and safe. The absence of this holding – this stitching together – produces what Elena Ferrante calls “dissolving margins,” a state of anxious terror in which “the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared.” I am responsible for holding my children together in the face of their daily fears, grief and frustrated rage. 

When containing my children’s storming emotions, I contain my own reactions: exhaustion and anger at continuous, unpredictable intrusions into my internal world. But my work also notices the luminous beauty, friendships and tenderness I know intimately as a parent. What a gift to be the listening ear. What sweet connection, closeness and meaning. 

Jacqueline Rose writes, “Mothers always fail…But insofar as mothers are seen as the fons et origo of the world, there is nothing easier than to make social deterioration look like something which it’s the sacred duty of mothers to prevent.” How would our relationships, personal and societal, flourish if we recognized the hidden labor of containment and transmission? 

I speak of mothers specifically because of our symbolic cultural weight. Thought to represent all women, the intensity of our symbolism leaks onto care providers, whose labor is disregarded as naturally-flowing and undeserving of consideration. I am looking to describe a fuller understanding of what it means to mother, love, contain and transmit.  

When the pandemic came to New York City, my children abruptly lost access to school and my life was constricted to a cramped apartment. But I had too much expressive force and maternal rage to contain. Yet again women bore the full weight of caregiving responsibility. Again we had been consigned to second place, our work devalued. I had been documenting birth in a culture lacking contextualizing narratives. But suddenly I was stuck, and I needed to find other ways to engage with ideas about family labor. 

Interruptible and not dependent on others, quilting fit my newly-boundaryless caregiving role. My first sewing projects were wobbly and followed patterns; soon they straightened out and became my own. They gesture toward the vast force of maternal labor: skillful, laborious, beautiful and mundane. Their enveloping warmth necessarily elides all of the cutting, tearing, and needle jabs that brought them into being. 

Quilts are caregiving objects, holding ideas of warmth, labor, mundanity, destruction and reconstruction. When I became a mother, I was torn apart like fabric and sewn back together into something new. My quilts track my learning, mistakes and growing competence. They mirror my parenting: at first reenacting the ways of others, I have come to find my own tone and center. 

And so we look at each other. In my photographs, my children and their friends sternly hold my gaze, lounge confidently with a blush of Cheeto dust on their faces, or close their eyes in a refusal. Quilts envelop – contain – my children as they wrestle, hide and revel in being held. A bee works on blighted mountain laurel; grapes grow elementally plump with leaves going crisp at the edges. 

I published Hard Times are Fighting Times, (Gnomic Book 2023), an archival and documentary photobook about the legacy of my family’s radical activism. My photographs of their propaganda, surveillance records, snapshots and current lives described their activism, and subsequent turn toward family life, from an intimate distance. 

My new work also uses recontextualization, archival practice and political narratives articulated through personal objects to bring caregiving perspectives into political realms. Practical objects lean against photographs, conversing and altering meaning. 

This project continues an expansive inquiry. How can I comment on archives by recontextualizing them? How can art push back in political realms? How can photography and archival practice stretch and articulate meaning? What is the work of parenthood? Where can we use photography to speak about psychological formation, gender and culture within families? In what ways do I contain my mother, my father, and my children?