Not Me but Through Me,  2022
and Not Me but Through Me II, 2025
MDF relief print and child's tempera paint stick child drawings on  newsprint wheat-pasted in barn studio, Art Farm Nebraska 
8' x 8' and ZACC Montana 

The labor of motherhood and of farming relies on repetitive cycles: feeding, waste disposal, and nurturing what is being grown. Caregiving as labor runs afoul of our society’s emphasis on productivity and output. The stress on linear work—work with a beginning, middle, and end—often leaves caretakers of children feeling devalued and disenfranchised. This holds doubly true for child-rearers who are farmers and ranchers.

​

As I researched farming for a separate project, I delved into Country Women, a magazine for women farmers of the 1970s. I was struck by the poems, writings, and half-realized drawings created by women who were my predecessors 50 years ago. Their musings were prescient of my own experience and anguish. Was accomplishing a creative pursuit while mothering and farming even possible? From the magazine I pulled texts describing work, labor, and mothering—metaphors about circles, images of handcuffs, and vows to break free from the linear production of capitalism.

Not Me But Through Me and Not Me But Through Me II use printmaking to stress the mundane repetitiveness of both farming and child-rearing. Childcare becomes integral to the process. Made collaboratively with my own child, the work references not only the labor it depicts but also the process of birth itself: a portal through which our children pass and around which our creation must orbit.