The Caretaker

'The caretaker' encounters the existence of profound gaps in society’s understanding of mothers and of motherhood.

Arising from the testimony of mothers who have twins, society is found to be largely disinterested in private, uncomfortable truths - preferring instead a sanitised, idealised view of the experience of being a mother.

Capturing the difficult, less talked-about aspects of motherhood, 'the caretaker' engages with a group of women whose broad experiences in this area overlap despite their often vast differences along geographic, economic, social and ethnic lines.

The project comprises portrait images, handwritten participant text and a short film.

Each image is accompanied by powerful and usually private thoughts reflective of their personal experiences of being a parent. The film presents a flowing, organic-like set of transitions between over 250 of the images and is deliberately weird or other worldly in nature as a means to represent identity confusion and the general destabilisation often felt.

Together these elements form part of a wider body of my work that is concerned with shifts in identity brought on by parenthood as well as the delineations between private and public spheres of life.

Recognising this ‘disconnect’, the work attempts to force some level of reconsideration as a departure from the ‘othering’ of mothers by society and projection of public truths.