Sculpture
2021
Frozen Mother's Milk, paper, ink.
Mother’s Milk currently exists as twelve pieces of photographic documentation of four individual frozen sculptures. Mother's Milk positions the production, extraction (which I performed every 4 hours for an hour for 11 months) and preservation of my Mother's Milk, as a vehicle for healing through ritual and spirituality. As an overproducer, that labor has since benefited my own child and 3 other infants. With this extended maternal connection, I started to imagine the potential of the topical healing properties of Mother's Milk as having the capacity to function as a tool for emotional healing. Inside of these frozen sculptures are handwritten notes from other people that describe emotional wounds and intergenerational traumas. The work draws parallels to spiritual and ritual practices that take physical representations of a harmful person, time or situation and destroys them to offer a final, thorough cleansing of its lingering hold on an individual. The destruction is in the melting of the Mother's Milk, which theoretically washes away the trauma, releasing the person from its hold.