sometimes pure light

Chrystal’s practice explores the relationship between mother and child, the mother, mothering and motherhood as relevant, reverent and sacrificial.

Chrystal is an emerging photographic artist based in Byron Bay, NSW on Bundjalung Country. Chrystal holds an honours degree with the University of Sydney and has worked as an Embryologist within the field of IVF for the past 10 years. These years inform her work, exploring literary connections in her art practice that is both embryonic and cerebral.

Chrystal’s practice explores the relationship between mother and child, the mother, mothering and motherhood as relevant, reverent and sacrificial. The deeply transformative reality of matresence, simultaneously speaking to the reproductive labour, its encroachment in domesticity, essential daily rituals, patriarchal and societal constructs that are at a visceral contradiction to the lived experience, a documentary approach to the deep work that is child rearing.

Chrystals work is highly personal, often documentary, blending autobiographical, philosophical inquiry driven by her own inner landscape. After her first daughters birth she is deeply interested in the space held by the mother, her lived experience and advocacy for her child did not reflect post-feminist western ideals.

Chrystals exploration interweaves both analogue and digital photography with art, sociology, psychology and other dimensions of knowledge and text in her photographic practice combining them to explore societal constructs, reproductive labour, estrangements and rituals of motherhood.