THE NEW MADONNAS | Statement

This body of work explores the complex relationships between mothers and their children. These relationships are based on a series of emotional and physical juxtapositions – simultaneous connection and separation, intimacy and disengagement, reliance and independence, idealization and reality. I photograph middle class, American families in an examination of the tension between a historically constructed maternal ideal and the social reality of motherhood. I draw inspiration from traditional representations of the mother and child, specifically Madonna and Child imagery.

I use the home as a stage for domestic melodrama, constructing scenes that combine fictitious allegory and metaphor, historical maternal iconography, and observed events within the home. In combining traditional ideals and contemporary realities, I investigate the pervasiveness of maternal idealization, and the complexities and anxieties it creates for contemporary mothers.