Matrescence

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“I thought early motherhood would be gentle, beatific, pacific, tranquil: bathed in a soft light. But actually it was hard-core, edgy, gnarly. It wasn't pale pink; it was brown of shit and red of blood. And it was the most political experience of my life, rife with conflict, domination, drama, struggle, and power.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood

 

Inspired by Lucy Jones' Matrescence (2024), this project is a deeply personal exploration of the raw and tender emotions tied to becoming a mother.

 

Matrescence, Jones explains, is a transformation as profound as adolescence. Yet the language society offers to describe motherhood—phrases like “feeling a bit tired” or “the baby blues”—fails to capture its depth and complexity. These simplifications trivialize the profound shifts that occur, reducing them to something manageable, even mundane.

 

Society’s expectations to keep motherhood separate from professional life, paired with the pervasive notion that it is “mindless and unintellectual,” create a sense of isolation. As Jones reflects, “I had always believed in the power of words. But here, they failed me.” 

 

This project is my attempt to go beyond those failed words, using images to convey the visceral, political, and transformative experience of motherhood—a reality that is as gnarly, edgy, and raw as Jones describes.

Hands became a recurring element in my photographs, often without intention. They seemed to embody the physicality of caregiving—the acts of holding, feeding, cleaning, comforting. Hands reaching, cradling, or bearing the marks of labor reflect the constant interplay of tenderness and effort.

Polaroids are woven through the series, as snapshots of moments I wanted to remember, moments of peace. Often my daughter with her father: embodying the image I had envisioned, the one I thought I understood. With these polaroids, I want to highlight the contrast between the ideal and the real, between the stories we tell each other and the truths I faced.

To be a mother is to be caught between creation and destruction, growth and decay—often all at once. Jones' words echoed through my process: the softness against the jagged, the fertile against the ruined. These are pieces of my story, visual fragments of how motherhood reshaped me, like waves against the shore: endlessly crashing and receding, leaving me a little more myself and a little less at the same time.