Baby Blues or A Season of Wintering, 2025 - ongoing

 

Cyanotype photographs on embossed wallpaper

​

My matrescence journey was surreal and all-consuming. I felt like I was losing my self, my mind, watching the world around me through fogged glass. The blurred edges of a fever dream. My experience of the “baby blues” passed only to manifest into full postpartum depression. I began creating these images as a way to process, to try to understand this new reality, what I was feeling, what I was becoming.

 

I was inspired by The Yellow Wallpaper, written in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This story describes a young woman, a writer, diagnosed with hysteria, whose mental health deteriorates after being isolated in a room with yellow wallpaper. I did not realize until revisiting this story after birthing my child, that she was also a new mother. She too was in her postpartum, confined to a nursery, experiencing complex emotions.

 

I have always loved this story, the woman’s descent into madness, possessed by her deepest animal self, becomes a kind of liberation. Looking back, I can now appreciate those early days, weeks, months, years in the cocoon. Metamorphosis is quiet and slow and rarely comfortable. But it is also beautiful. Like her, I emerged anew, reborn as mother. My matrescence journey was a refuge, a space of introspection, healing and transformation. A season of wintering.

​

​
 

​

​