Lacuna

Lacuna (2017–), is an ongoing, multidisciplinary project that combines photographs, photograms, photographic collages, casts, and plaster sculptures to interrogate the malleability of motherhood.

Lacuna is an ongoing, multidisciplinary project that combines photographs, photograms, photographic collages, artist books, and sculpture to interrogate the malleability of motherhood. In Lacuna, Woods shows a body turned inside out and remade through her children’s bodies, while also probing the gaps and conflicts of maternal experience.

The work in Lacuna is highly iterative and shows evidence of being made and remade. Like motherhood itself, the work is continually remixed and rebuilt. Bodies are multiplied and erased through extensive layering, fragmentation, and re-photography. Figures and forms combine, break, grow, shrink, and reassemble to generate spaces of vertigo, ambivalence, and reorientation. Additionally, blank plaster fragments, used throughout the exhibition, function as lacunae—unfilled gaps or intervals—that become the unwritten spaces in which the mother’s identity can be rewritten.

 Woods’ hybrid approach to image-making in Lacuna illuminates the pliancy of maternal experience, showcasing how maternal perspective can expand the discourse around identity and gender in contemporary art.