The labor of motherhood and of farming rely on repetitive cycles; feeding, waste disposal, and nurturing what is being grown. Care-giving as labor runs afoul of our society's emphasis on productivity and output. The stressing of linear work- work with a beginning, middle, and end- often leaves caretakers of children feeling devalued and disenfranchised. This holds doubly true for child-reares 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 1970’s. I was struck by the poems, writings, and half realized drawings created by women 50 years my predecessors. 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 every text describing work, labor, and mothering. The results were  metaphors about circles, images of handcuffs, and vows to break free of the linear production of capitalism. 

Not Me But Through Me uses printmaking to stress the mundane repetitiveness of both farming and child rearing. Childcare became an integral process to creating the installation. The work was made collaboratively with my own child who was tasked with drawing while I worked. The process of keeping my child occupied fueling the creation of the installation. The shape of the work references not just the nature of the labor it depicts but the process of birth itself, acting as a portal through which our children pass and around which our creation must orbit.