Image © Zee Anna Photography
ART EXPLORES MOTHERHOOD
Since becoming a mother and caring for my two young sons full-time, I've found that my creative life has entered a state of ebb and flow. The tide's gently ebbing while my children are now my priority, but every once and a while, the waves roar back in ways I would've never before appreciated.
Last year offered me three milestones. The first two milestones—works from my Fourth & Forever Trimester series' new home in Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute, and a lecture about Renaissance-era images of motherhood at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg—were made all the more poignant as they occurred in the middle of third and most monumental milestone: my second pregnancy.
As Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute honors the work of sexual researcher Alfred Kinsey, its ample art collection not only celebrates human sexuality, but maybe the results of it—hence the acquisition of three of my postpartum sketches. I was able to share more works from the same series as a part of “Renaissance Babies & Images of Motherhood,” a lecture given with Natalie Velez in honor of Women’s History Month at the MFA, St. Pete., as contemporary examples of motherhood imagery in conversation and contrast with notable Italian Renaissance works depicting the Madonna and Child.
Before having children, I wasn’t sure if a creative career and motherhood would intertwine much; I naively assumed that one might even keep the other at bay. Shipping drawings and speaking about Madonnas with a growing pregnant belly gave me a reassuring, primordial joy, as it proved that both those paths not only converge, but fortify and illuminate the other.
The year before, a personal essay I wrote--Adventures in Millennial Motherhood--went semi-viral on the Medium platform. Even if I didn't have time to draw, I carved out time to write, trying to use another medium to capture the transformation my life was going through. Whether writing or daydreaming about future drawings, I found that my conceptual interests became increasingly autobiographical.
A wave crescendoed while I was pregnant with my first son in 2023. Method & Concept’s director, Chad Jensen, not only commissioned me to compose and execute the largest drawing I’ve ever made at 12 feet tall by 5 feet wide, but entrusted me with that task well into my pregnancy’s second trimester. That not only tested my own technical capabilities, but also ignited a newfound ambition: I decided that this new drawing should honor my pregnancy, however obliquely.
Two images I’d had floating in my head for a while seemed to have been waiting for this towering vertical composition. Both images resonated with me all the more after becoming pregnant: the first, a Boeing 747 transporting the space shuttle Endeavour, and the second, Anna Hyatt Huntington’s Joan of Arc equestrian sculpture in Manhattan’s Riverside Park. Though one speaks to technology and the other to valor and sainthood, I now see them from a different perspective, in which both also speak to dualities: how one entity carries another to launch its vulnerable counterpart into vast and heroic futures.
To me, Carriers is all about one entity bracing itself to absorb the impact of its tinier traveler charging into the unknown, whether that’s into the cosmos or onto a battlefield. At one point in my life, I yearned to be the space shuttle and the warrior; now, I unconditionally accept the stamina and sacrifice in being the 747 and the warhorse. Pairing the two images didn't only reinforce the idea that these pursuits are timeless, with the sculpture looking back into history and the aircraft looking forward towards progress and exploration. Pairing them also emphasized that they’re a duality squared, two images of two, hopefully reflecting all the more ardently that, while I drew this, I was a duality, too.