Matrescence: Acts of Mothering

Matrescence explores the unseen architectures of motherhood as both lived experience and cultural condition. The unseen labour, contradictions, and resilience of care. Portraits that reframe the maternal body as both ordinary and sacred.

Matrescence explores motherhood as both lived experience and social condition, where care, contradiction, and survival coexist. Through portraiture and documentary observation, the project witnesses mothers within their domestic worlds: the gestures of care, the quiet rituals of labour, the moments of rupture that go unseen and endurance that define maternal life.

The work grew from my own experience of becoming a mother, from the disorienting beauty and fear of early motherhood, to moments as visceral as watching my child choke on water. These experiences redefined my understanding of fragility and love. I began to photograph mothers both as archetypes, and witness to their own lives, each navigating the invisible architectures of care that underpin our culture.

The mothers in these images are seen head-on: neither idealised nor broken, but whole in their complexity. Their homes become landscapes of resilience and fatigue; their gestures, acts of devotion and resistance. I am interested in the comical duality of maternal life, how tenderness and exhaustion exist in the same breath, how love can be both burden and prayer.

Matrescence seeks to expand the visual literacy of motherhood. It challenges the cultural hijacking of the maternal figure and advocates for a re-seeing of the domestic sphere, not as private or sentimental, but as the seat of humanity itself, a site where care, creation and survival converge.

With a background in embryology, I approach the maternal as both biological and philosophical terrain, an ecology of connection and belief that empathy and care are evolutionary imperatives. Matrescence reframes motherhood not as private sentiment but as the original act of creation and endurance.

Through this work, I seek to build a visual and material vocabulary of the maternal, one that acknowledges the thread that binds us all. In the gestures of care and the quiet defiance of the everyday, this work asks what it means to mother, to hold, to repair, to remain, in a world that depends on care yet rarely honours it.