ANTHROPOLOGY of MOTHERHOOD

Aesthetics of Care

Sophia Cardillo

Emotional Labor, Magazine cutouts, cotton quilting fabric, glue, watercolor paper, 2024

The act of bearing life is inherently creative, inviting meaning-making from the desperation, joy, loss, and love encountered through conception, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. My artwork explores how caregiving and creative practice inform and inspire each other.

Following a pregnancy loss in 2024, I pivoted from conceptual work to the intuitive medium of collage, visually processing what I couldn’t yet articulate in words. My multidisciplinary practice adapts to the rhythms of caregiving, using materials like postpartum care objects, magazine cutouts, and my grandmother’s fabric stash—portable and “child-safe” for work at the dining table or playground. These materials not only reflect the constraints of caregiving but embody its messages: cutting and weaving postpartum underwear into soft sculptures like baskets and pillows signifies the dual need to nurture both our vulnerable and powerful selves. Through quilting techniques and fabric, I honor the artistic legacy of mothers before me, including my grandmothers—avid makers who, like many women of their time, never called themselves artists.

My work documents my bodily experiences while questioning how communities care for maternal bodies amid the profound physical and emotional transformations of motherhood.

Hannah Colen
two angels, Photography, 2025

After a Lunar New Year dinner together, we talked about how seeing each other felt like finally exhaling after holding our breath too long. Over shared food and conversation, there was comfort in being understood without needing to explain. 

Sitting in a shared stillness; intertwined. There was ease in the way we were able to hold one another. 

Mélanie Janel
Matrescence Poetry, 35 mm photography on matte paper, 2024

Being a doula and an artist, I believe that caring is a poetic activist act. In my art work I care about the invisible, the unseen in the transformation of becoming a mother, and I co-create photography and art pieces that reveals this process. I find aesthetics in the poetry of life force that carry woman who becomes mother.

I make connection between art making and care, weaving in circles, with the community, committed to the transmission of knowledge for fertile emancipation, and reclaiming the aesthetics of doula care.

Valuing the power of bonding to weave an healthy and cooperative new earth, a Movement for Matriculture.

Laura Lee McCartney
Apron Strings, Vintage apron, mixed fibers, wire form, 2016

I explore spaces to unravel moments of caring and “uncaring” for the things we hand down as mothers and daughters. For this piece, I turned to my great-grandmother’s apron that was saved in an old family trunk for over a century. Originally, I thought this piece was not significant or worthy to keep or display because of the many ways it had not been cared for—it was stained, ripped and covered in moth holes. However, I was able to reconsider family threads I inherited and use them as sites to remember and feel my own preservation and decay. The apron became a site for me to cut, rip, tear, and “uncare” in order to better care for self in my story of becoming. My daughter was born under great distress in an emergency caesarian delivery at 25 weeks old—weighing only 1 pound, 11 ounces. Much like this old apron packed into a trunk, I had packed my pain away so I would not retrace or relive the trauma. I was able to reimagine the scar tissue of my soul in new ways. I measured the length of the scar I still carry on my abdomen from the day I was literally opened into motherhood and caregiving. I laid a large red thread down the front of my great-grandmother’s apron to mark the distance and the wound on the fabric. I used vintage black thread from my great-grandmother’s sewing basket to stitch traces of the 37 staples that were used to secure my incision. I frayed the red wool in between and in-between the stitches, undoing its edges. I opened myself one-stitch at a time. Finally free. I ran my hand over the fibers, and thought about the ways apron strings can be used for other things.

Saskia Le Peissker Between Us
Camouflage, Photography Nikon Z6, 2025
Reaching Out, Photography Nikon Z6, 2025
Consumed, Photography Nikon Z6, 2025
Look Closer, Photography Nikon Z6, 2025
Silent Watching, Photography Nikon Z6, 2025

Motherhood is expected to be joyful, fulfilling, natural. But what happens when it isn’t? Between Us is an exploration of the unseen complexities of early motherhood: the quiet distance, the weight of expectations, the emotions that linger in the spaces between.

Photographed from my baby’s perspective, this series captures a reality often left unspoken. I am both present and absent, held in place by the invisible thread of responsibility, love, and loss of self.

In a world that romanticizes motherhood, Between Us reveals what is rarely acknowledged: that connection and disconnection, love and isolation, can coexist.

The process of creating these images became a form of release, giving me the courage to confront the darkest parts of myself. It allowed me to see myself as a mother through the lens of my child - a perspective I struggled to find within.

Kat Marquez
Ingat Ka, Block print,2022

I’ve always appreciated my family’s Filipino culture. This is a block print representing Kamayan, the traditional Filipino practice of eating food with your hands. This practice is significant as Filipinos believe food is best enjoyed spread across banana leaves on tables and eaten alongside a community. Family and friends would then gather around, eating the food straight from the table with their hands, using their fingers to grab the food, and then using their thumbs to guide the food from their four fingers into their mouths. I remember how the older members of my family — usually my Lolas, or grandmothers — asked if we had eaten already, and even if we did, they would be sure to provide food for us to eat and take home. "Kumain ka na ba? / Have you eaten yet?" is a common phrase in many Filipino homes, including mine. Thus, the phrase "Ingat ka / Take Care" is emphasized by how much care is associated with food and community in Filipino traditions.

Ella-Gabriel Mason
egg walk, Video, 2:19 minutes, 2022

EGG WALK (2022) is a short video performance exploring fragility, care, destruction, and nourishment. In this piece I am playing with methods of care that belong to another species, attempting to carry and protect an egg on my feet. Inevitable failure leads to a nourishing treat for my cats. In this work I am thinking about the grotesque and monstrous elements of care and the way that care work includes repeated failures and disconnections.

Evangeline Mensah-Agyekum
Rite of Passage: Marker 1,
Photo print, curtains, curtain rod, fake grass, 2024

“Rite of Passage” is an ongoing project about the “parentification” of eldest daughters. This first installation, “Rite of Passage: Marker 1”, examines my own personal experiences as an eldest daughter with six younger siblings to Ghanaian immigrants. 

In the photo, is myself with my then 16 year old sister, on my back, wrapped in African fabric. We are in a living room set outside. This photo is a recreation of an instance when parentification took place during my childhood. At the time, I was eight years old rocking my infant sister, the same one pictured, to sleep on my back. I was proud to be helping my family in this way, but in hindsight, I was only a child.

This work aligns with the theme of "The Aesthetics of Care" by firstly acknowledging the invisible labor of eldest daughters taken on within our families. As adults, now looking back at our childhoods and this identity that most of us took on with pride, we can come to a better understanding of this nuanced identity, while navigating womanhood and expanding our sense of self beyond our families. Giving ourselves permission to mourn and heal from a childhood lost by confronting how we were made to take on the role and responsibilities of the third parent.

“Rite of Passage” serves as a deep form of healing for myself and other eldest daughters through reflection, mourning, and acknowledgement. In honoring eldest daughters, and the labor and care that is often overlooked, this project shows appreciation and celebrates the fullness of who we are, beyond what we were asked to carry.

Elizabeth Mae Renfrew
Into and Out of the Womb, Porcelain and black underglaze, gas reduction kiln fired, 2024

I integrate yoga, meditation and art. I facilitate spaces to breathe into feelings, and process emotions using clay. A tremendous connection to self can be found in stillness. A gentle movement practice in alignment with breath allow energy to move through the body. 

I focus on feeling and slowing breath while pressing into the mass of clay. Gently pressing into the clay and releasing correlated with breath… following the sensation of breath into the body and dow into the pelvic bowl…I imagine each impression filling the space with love and gratitude for this experience, in this life, this body, thus far.

I collapse time and space, breathing…. into all the pelvic bowls I came from…. Robin Lynn Switzer, Judy Elizabeth Switzer, Buelah Mae Van Guilder - then into the unknown space. The clay looks like a stretched womb or belly as mine does now. The stretched, broken sections and jagged edges that formed through the process will not be refined. Images painted in black underglaze on the interior of the bowls only from are family photos of these women.

Hidden images, symbolism of form, and the transformative firing represent the changes to the exterior of our being and the internal landscape of the psyche as well as the hidden womb responsible for holding the metamorphosis of motherhood and beyond. Life at times can feel like getting blasted with fire while holding delicate, sacred memories inside and unseen. 

This is utilitarian, expressive and an incredibly forgiving medium to explore. Clay before it is fired can always be returned to its original state. It is a delicate relationship with dirt and water. Every part of the process demands patience, there is no rushing clay, the entire process in a labor of love and commitment to a process of transformation. It is magic. 

Sarah Rose
Hoover Dam, Sound recording, rotary phone, pedestal, 2018-2025

Motherhood is a paradox—both heaven and hell wrapped in the same exhausting, beautiful experience. Raw, Relentless, Suffocating. This spoken word piece that each person participating will get a private 3 minute performance that mimics so many real life phone calls to other mothers who just " get it" and trying to explain to to anyone who doesn't.  

One moment, you are basking in the wonder of your child’s laughter; the next, you are on your knees, overwhelmed by the weight of responsibility. Motherhood (care) is not just an action but also a form of beauty, sensitivity, and attentiveness that shapes us all. 

Carrie Smith Libman
The Seeds We Plant, The Castles We Build, Household artifacts, outgrown toys and clothes, thread, wire, paper, 56 x 18 x 14 inches, 2023.

From the first small kick of my ribs, I have been hyper aware of my role as a mother. Be the environment, the soil, the sun, and the rain. Hold lightly your hopes and dreams for your children. Cultivate, like a gardener, the environment for them to chase and realize their own.

Since becoming a mother my practice has become a direct and indirect collaboration with my children. I document their growth alongside my own rebirth, each piece a balance of chaos and control. I work in short, colorful bursts of time, an imperfect patchwork of moments and memories and future concepts. Collage and assemblage lend themselves to this style of working and the current stage of motherhood I’m in. I make work from the domestic artifacts of our life: outgrown toys, threadbare onesies, and daily clutter. Out of the collaged masses sprout seedlings and wildflowers, new and undefined, confident, eager, and fragile all the same. The fledgling, unfinished leaves and buds are as much myself as they are my children, as they are any of us, stretching toward the sun, delicate and full of potential. The work becomes an artifact of these first few years of parenting, a combination of very physical care, constant doubt if you are doing it right, and children that continue to grow.

Stefanie Zito
Pink Line, Video and artifact, found objects on pedestal, 2022

Plunging through notebook paper, the machine’s needle in this video traces over the margin’s pink boundary of my deconstructed morning pages. As I stitch narrow strips of notebook paper together, a ribbon begins to wind and twirl upon itself, filling the space between me and the camera. The edges of my days are where my art-making resides in this time of early motherhood. While my creative time feels scant and limited, when I look back and think of every small stroke of the pen, every line filled on every page, stitched together, I can reflect on abundance over a longer span of time.

Performing this piece brought this to mind: seemingly meager efforts we can put forth or small contributions we can make for change—what little we individually can control connects with a common thread and add up to an overwhelming and unsuspecting avalanche of impact.