Making My Way to the Shore

Making My Way to the Shore explores my life as a woman, without children, at the end of her fertile years. The title of my project came from Sheila Heti’s book Motherhood. Heti writes about the relativity of being forty and starting a career in literature versus becoming a mother. “If you were forty, beginning it, you could be said to be young. In everything else, I was old, all the boats were far off, away from the shore, while I was still making my way to the shore.”

I was searching to understand that life is a continuum and that having a child was not the only answer for mine to be deemed worthy. Negotiating the space between what could have been and uncertainty about the future during this sliver of time is represented in this series. The window to my childbearing years rapidly closing gave me a newfound urgency to explore my family lineage and the cyclical nature of life.

My project focuses on the mix of mundane and momentous occasions in my life and my family’s lives. My niece losing her first tooth and the reversal of care as my mother helps my grandmother get ready for the day became equally important moments in exploring the theme of aging. Coming to terms with my own aging is reflected in the portraits of my family members and where they are in the different stages of their lives.

Revisiting landscapes of personal significance became a metaphor for my feelings about the scope of life as a woman of a certain age. The grandness of these places gives an understanding of how much is out of your control. The combination of landscapes, portraits and everyday moments in my project come together to represent the multilayered complexity of life.