“Red shoes”, my first words, a foreshadowing of this moment. You wear them with an eagerness to bloom. Two sizes too big doesn’t matter. Your beauty is beyond what the shoes can ever hold.
INFLORESCENCE: a group or cluster of flowers arranged on a stem.
To flower is to become obvious.
“Red shoes”, my first words, a foreshadowing of this moment. You wear them with an eagerness to bloom. Two sizes too big doesn’t matter. Your beauty is beyond what the shoes can ever hold.
INFLORESCENCE: a group or cluster of flowers arranged on a stem.
To flower is to become obvious.
You asked me if I wanted tea. “Colour tea,” you said. “Red tea, blue tea.”
The tea of time and love. Steeped in each other’s presence.
You are the alchemy of red shoes and blue ocean, synchronicity and wonder.
You are the alchemy of red shoes and blue ocean, synchronicity and wonder.
MAGENTA: A blush of awareness, a flush of aliveness. The juicy darkness of my palms meeting each other on my forehead. The magnetism of falling in love.
GOLD: What I see when I meditate by the rising sun. The threads of you woven together as sisters.
When I ask you, “What do we need to grow?” you say, “The colour of laughing.”
I feel the nested presence of you in the shimmering colours I see when I close my eyes, where the matter of our bodies exists within the other. Where the matter of all life exists within the other. A cell contains the cosmos. My body contains the earth. The ocean contains the sky. Belonging begins in the body. Each beginning, a gathering of broken pieces of wonder, reconnecting in constellations. My awareness is the gatherer, holding the stars with open palms.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Gathering Stars is an autobiographical photography project about motherhood, healing, and wonder that grew out of my recovery from breast cancer. Created over six years, this work is a vivid and intimate inquiry into the fragility and resilience of life, beginning with my breast cancer diagnosis as a new mother, through my fertility journey and birth of my second baby, and ending with finding moments of grace in a pandemic with my two daughters. My daughters and I are observers and subjects in these photographs, demonstrating how healing and wonder live side by side during times of uncertainty and abundance. A life well lived does not resist pain but transforms it into beauty.