Like Mother, Like Daughter

Like Mother, Like Daughter is a photographic project that examines gendered generational obligations stemming from domesticity, and aims to counter the self-erasure and dismissal of “women’s work” within my family.

My mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother have left literal and metaphorical scars in our family archive. These collections of photos document their struggles in wanting to be seen and appreciated for the intensive domestic labor they participated in while also displaying palpable trauma from the rejection and dismissal of their accomplishments. These women have spent countless hours and an unquantifiable amount of energy devoted to creating beautiful things. However, they also scratched themselves out of color slides, violently purged their images from family portraits with scissors in hand, and continuously turned their backs to the camera. My work emerges from their desires to both create and destroy. In Like Mother, Like Daughter, I combine photography, specifically self-portraiture and images from my family archive, with installation and craft to create a feminist body of work that simultaneously recognizes my matrilineage and elevates domestic work to contemporary art. This project is about love and anger and the transfer of these sentiments through generations of women. It is ultimately a memorial to the thousands of hours of labor never recognized and a jeremiad against patriarchal judgments that condemned and consigned these efforts for far too long.