Landscapes of maternal ambivalens

Being a mother can feel like moving through a disorienting landscape of contrasts: Black and white, loss and gain, conflicting emotions and deep raw love. This project tells this ambivalent story through motifs found on the floor of a parking garage.

Motherhood is both a spiritual awakening and a lonely job full of duties. A mother is not something you are. It is something you are becoming every day for the rest of your life once your child is born. It is an ever changing landscape of feelings and experiences - often beyond words.

With the making of this project I seek to understand the disorienting contrasts of motherhood. Being a mother is an act of balance. It is holding two opposits at the same time: You and me. Yes and no. Deep love and deep fear. Light and darkness. Knowing it all and being lost. Sometimes it is like walking a fine line between sane and insane.

Still in these days the ambivalens of motherhood is a taboo. The myth of parenting as an act of continous and endless selflessness and joy is still being pushed. If we talk about complexity we always try to explain and use logic arguments to win a war of debate. We lack a language that is beyond psychology, biology and politics. A third dimension that doesn't argue but lets us feel.

With this project I seek to make the viewer feel the ambivalens through a language of visual poetry found in an everyday setting - the basement.

All photographs in this project are shot with an Iphone in a parking garage. Patterns in the concrete floor, oil, dirt, puddles and the play of light and shadow are the materials of these human “cave paintings" that in so many surprising details told my own story about becoming a mother.