“Working Mother” is an ongoing series exploring memory, identity, gender roles, motherhood, and childhood alike. Using passed down sewing patterns from my mother’s collection and crayons snuck away from my son’s boxes, I attempt to connect two different generations while reflecting my own experience adjusting to my “Working Mother” title. A title that was put into question when, one week after telling my manager I was pregnant with my second child, my job title changed, and my team was moved to someone new, so I could “focus on what was important.’
Six months after I returned from maternity leave, I lost my job altogether. (“Restructuring.”) Two months after that, Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Through the inability to control each encaustic crayon splatter paired with the precise trim around each sewing pattern model, this series attempts to embody the tension of being a working mother today. Between the unpredictable, colorful chaos and the outdated expectations placed upon women – as a mother by choice, in a country simultaneously eliminating women’s right to choose, I find myself in new, alarmingly unsustainable, and scary territory.
While at first glance, I hope the viewer feels a childlike joy and curiosity before realizing what they are really looking at is nothing short of an explosion.