Deassimilation Diet

Archival Pigment Prints, Performance, 2017-ongoing

My ongoing series, Deassimilation Diet, grew from a consideration of parenting in post-industrial, assimilated American culture. I needed to start feeding my first daughter solid foods and without grandmothers and ancestral knowledge, felt cut off from lineage and its wisdom. When pregnant and postpartum with my second child, I started using the camera to aesthetically interpret the physical, emotional and spiritual experience of mothering, using organic materials and staged performative actions to consider ritual, porosity, and nourishment. Mothering is simultaneously corporal and spiritual and I wanted to translate this human sensation. Instead of relying on theatrical emotive acting for the camera, my methodology blurs the line between still-life and portraiture to signal toward the ferocity of human experience. Focusing on the gesture of hands as a method of portraiture, this work generates intimate, vulnerable moments to translate the raw and sacred sensation of maternal caregiving and raising daughters.