The life happening here

Here I am finding my own sentence, my own form, a visual language I can recognize. This work is my way of telling the truth of my life as I know it.

In her essay, Say Yes to Life, writer and curator Helen Molesworth reflects on Tacita Dean’s collaboration with time. She uses words like: duration. Cumulation. Slow and quiet. She writes of 1960s and 70s auteur cinema:

“Those…films were discussed within a feminist criticism that saw in cinematic duration a representation of the cyclical logic of the everyday…in which the cumulation of details was more important than the shocking or dramatic main event. This slowness was sometimes called ‘women’s time.’”

Telling the truth of my life — while working within the constraints and possibilities of my days — has necessitated a refusal of the canon of photography: the image that shocks, The Decisive Moment, that climactic event. I am looking instead for those quiet and daily miracles, women’s time and moments accumulating, art made in relationship with the everyday. In this work, images echo and repeat — there goes a hand, a hand, a hand. Some photos are left incomplete, a half-thought, a moment fragmented, pulled close, so close all context is lost. And in the leaving out there is an invitation — an invitation to feel into and answer the image with one’s own life, an image carried on together. Most of the photographs are small, often under 3 inches tall, and they can easily be held.

This is a work made of the repetitions, proximities, and interruptions of motherhood — an adamant attention to ordinary life. It shares with you the efforts of its making, of the body that made it. The grain, the dust, the life left in. Each image, in it’s own way, a gentle refusal — my answer to the silence, the ‘mother-shaped hole’ as the author Hettie Judah puts it in her book How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (I have seen often the portrayal of mothers — the fetishization, the figure — but still there is so little record of the true and deeply varied lived experience of motherhood.) And what is the cost of this? Please believe there is a cost to this.

I have been thinking lately, I keep thinking about Virginia Woolf. How she believed women writers must transform radically, urgently the literary tradition to meet their own needs — that it was never meant for them. She writes in “A Room of One’s Own” about breaking things — sentences, sequences — to create something capable of holding and attending honestly to their truths. Novelist Rachel Cusk explains: “The woman of the future…will devise her own kind of sentence, her own form, and she’ll use it to write about her own reality.”

This work I am making — this work I have started to call The life happening here — this is me finding my own sentence, my own form, a visual language I can recognize. This work is my way of telling the truth of my life as I see it.