milk and tears

'milk and tears' reimagines photographic history by using mothers' breast milk in the salted paper process, reconsidering the print as a living vessel that can hold care, labor, ancestry, and our fragile entanglement with the environment.

As a photographic artist, my studio practice reconsiders art history through a feminist lens to engage urgent questions of care, particularly in relation to mothering and climate change. Through material experimentation, I reimagine the print as a living body: an imperfect vessel that ages with time, holds history and ancestry, converses with other bodies, and exists in close relationship to its environment.

milk and tears uses mother’s breast milk as a salting solution in the historic salted paper process to reimagine one of photography's earliest processes, making prints that reflect on nourishment, bodily memory as transferred through ancestry, and society’s reliance on the unsupported labor of parenting. Breastmilk adds bodily labor to the print, while also injecting a uniquely feminist narrative into the history of photography. Still lifes of stacked blocks serve as totems to the intimate and often private struggle of the postpartum period. They are precariously balanced, serving as a visual metaphor for our impossible ideals of trying to balance our work and home lives, our public and private selves. Each print is unique as tonal shifts and fat splatters swirl like small galaxies. These differences remind us that our bodies are not machines, but imperfect organisms. They encourage acceptance and understanding while countering the perfectionist rhetoric ingrained in the photographic medium.

The project has collaborated with more than fifty fellow mothers to date, each of whom is invited to coat paper with their breast milk, introducing their hand into the work. My son’s tears are added as a secondary source of salt, further alluding to the emotional tensions of intimacy and mothering. Our modern society overlooks care as something frivolous and sequestered, but here care is exposed as a necessary building block, the key to meaningful connection to each other and our environment.