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This series of images represents a transition in my life, which could be said to reflect similar experience for many women returning to work after a time of raising children. Displaced is my title, and has often been my overriding emotion both before and during this time.
Choosing to spend time at home as a new mother was a luxury I have not taken for granted, but it also presented as a kind of sacrifice. The before-motherhood-me was almost without domestication. Having babies stripped away the apparent sophistication of working life, and left me with opportunity, and perhaps necessity, to become a housewife. I embraced that traditional role with gusto, and abandoned my career, albeit temporarily.
With that inevitable march of time, my sons reached school age, and I felt a yearning to regain some professional dignity. That re-entry to the industry was like walking naked down Lambton Quay. I felt so exposed, unworthy, frumpy and tongue-tied. Not only that, but returning to being a working professional is a circus act, tending the needs of family and home, while also being available for clients and able to meet deadlines.
I now find myself more comfortably straddling the two worlds. I am less concerned about what people think, and about whether I measure up to some unseen but implied expectation. I have transformed once again, a hybrid mother/photographer. I am often in an unfamiliar place, feeling ever so slightly fraudulent, but doing it anyway.
The three images show three aspects of this transformation. Learn, Clean, Feed. Each is an interpretation of a vanitas - the images loaded with symbolism, but presented as still life. An hourglass talks of the passage of time, a butterfly of metamorphosis. The apple, femininity, the books that are closed, learning incomplete. I am the apron, abandoned domesticity, in a disconnected environment.