slippage

Slippage 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.

Slippage examines motherhood not as continuity but as rupture: a state in which identity fractures and reforms under the conditions of care. Through portraiture and embodied observation, the work considers the maternal body as both lived experience and cultural structure, a site where labour, memory, and transformation intersect.

Working from my background in embryology alongside photographic practice, I approach motherhood as biological and philosophical terrain. The images attend to the gestures and systems that sustain life yet remain culturally obscured: feeding, holding, watching, recovering. Domestic spaces become psychological landscapes, revealing the tension between visibility and erasure within maternal experience.

Rather than idealising or sentimentalising motherhood, the project explores matrescence as destabilisation, a process of division and return. Reflections, interruptions, and fragmented compositions suggest multiplicity: past and present, self and lineage, autonomy and obligation.

These portraits resist fixed narratives of the “good mother.” Instead, they propose the maternal gaze as witness and critique, expanding the visual language of motherhood toward complexity, endurance, and transformation.