Project Launch

Check out this video summing up August and September, read below for details.

In August, after nailing down the details of the budget, I got a haul of art supplies! A pile of oil paints, a couple new brushes, some painting odds and ends, and I felt ready to tackle the seven portraits that anchor this project.

See Me Bearing uses two mediums in pursuit of the establishment of the childbearer as an alternative archetype. While I'll use large scale oil paintings to create a 'pantheon' of seven real childbearers to draw from, I will turn to t-shirts as a means of connecting the wisdom within their experiences to real members of the community. So, in addition to painting supplies I stocked up on black ink and paper to create drawings for the t-shirt graphics.

The canvases I'm working on are so big (5 feet tall) that the most feasible way to go about it was to assemble and stretch them myself. After doing that seven times, I already feel very connected and committed to the work; it already feels like a BIG THING.

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Throughout September, I was able to make progress on the most important aspect of this thing: reaching out to real Buffalonian childbearers and inviting them to join the project.

The default male warrior archetype puts his life on the line for the greater good, as does the childbearer; unfortunately, advances in medicine haven't changed the aptness of this comparison much for mothers of color in the United States. Thus, I'm keen to center their perspectives here.

I reached out to local doulas, and discussed the ideas underpinning See Me Bearing. I heard back with some names and contacts, who I then reached out to and explained the basic idea. I was able to meet with each person and hear about their experiences, get acquainted, answer their questions about the project, and give them some resources about artistic symbolism to think over.

We hadn't even developed any of the ideas yet, but already a common theme was coming up: duality. Every single mother spoke in some way about suddenly inhabiting two different realities (protected/closed and open wide, sweetness and grief, gratitude and overwhelming loss, the past self and the present self, feeling at once invisible and highly scrutinized...). I can't wait for you to hear their brilliant ideas, in future updates.

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Throughout that same month, I launched my web presence. I decided that a pair of animations on the website explaining the concept of See Me Bearing would do a more compelling job than blocks of text. So, on top of designing and building a website to serve as the face of the project, I assigned myself the added task of learning animation on Procreate Dreams! The development of the animations definitely stretched me.

But it was worth the effort because I feel between the animations, the graphic diagrams and my two-page statement, the website offers a rich array of material. Please give yourself a tour, and share any aspect of it you like with someone who might be interested in what I'm doing here.