Containment

Containment is a photography and quilting installation about motherwork, play and psychological formation.

Containment is several series of color photographs featuring children playing with my handmade quilts against bursts of green growth. The images look at wildness and care in motherhood. They speak about transitional phenomena, play, containment and love.

In psychological terms, containment is the experience of being held: kept whole and safe. A parent takes in a child’s storming emotions and, in describing them, transforms them into something that can be thought about. I am not seen in these pictures, but I am everywhere in this work: holding a camera, making quilts, containing, letting go.

These quilts, like me in my motherwork, are caregiving objects of ordinary beauty performing essential work. Skillful, laborious, beautiful and common, quilts embody maternal labor, and their enveloping warmth elides the cutting, tearing, and needle jabs that brought them into being.

Children scoop mud onto their legs, their long bodies traverse wet rocks, they are playing. Quilts envelop – contain – my children and their friends as they wrestle, hide and revel in being held. Through concealment they are performing rituals toward forming themselves.

Beloved toys, art objects, imaginative play: transitional objects emerge from the tension between internal experience and shared reality. This isn’t play in the sense of not-work, of diversion, but of meaning-making, creation and understanding. Charged with meaning, dependent on context, this process lets children, and artists, negotiate between inner and outer worlds.

When I became a mother, I was torn apart like fabric and sewn back together into something new. Now I watch my children’s private rituals and movements as they enchant and form themselves, growing. We are gathering symbols toward assembling meaning.