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I was young when I became a mother. My adult life has been defined by mothering and I don’t know a life otherwise. My twenties were spent tending to tiny earnest humans with big eyes and blonde hair, teetering on this invisible line between mother and self, both terrified by it and in awe of it, as any adventurer is. Life picked me up and and placed me, quite precisely, on this path and I fell into it completely. I became a doula in my mid twenties and in time, began photographing the births and tender postpartum homes that I attended. It isn’t just my own motherhood I’ve known intimately. And while the things that drive me or call me forwards have changed slightly, softly evolving over the years, as my children do, as I do, the thread I follow remains. While it’s unusual for me to attend births these days, maybe my roots are there, and I remain close to them. So much about the wild and tender birth space informs the works I seek to make now. The birth space is elemental and deeply intimate. Birth requires us to get to the truth and quickly, to be open and present. It’s that place that I love to work from. There is a sweet and simple sacredness in this space, so close to the truth, and it’s here that I want to land when making photos, even just for the briefest of moments, when it’s just you, just us and what is. We might find it in the bathroom; it lives in the work that takes place there, the daily rhythms overlapping each morning and evening. In the gentle brushing of milk teeth or admiring the fresh gap left behind as another baby tooth goes under the pillow; the untangling of knotted hair; pulling pyjamas off little limbs in the morning or back on again in the evening; in the running of baths, the wiping of small noses and bottoms, or the pulling of a shower curtain around a child growing up and wanting privacy for the first time. We might find it in the kitchen, where love is manifested in a hundred more ways; with pancakes made at breakfast, while sleep still tugs at your body and mind; or salad sticks cut just so; another round of lunches and dinners; sandwiches and snacks into lunchboxes and leftovers into Tupperware in the fridge; the ceaseless wiping, of surfaces and sides, of sticky hands and faces and floors. Or in a timely cup of tea poured by your love, because they just know. These moments are as beautiful as they are boring. They are gruelling and gorgeous. They roll over and over and over and they are nothing and everything at once. They are it; the earth from which everything else grows.
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