Mother's Days
2012 - 2014 / typewriter ink, construction paper, document repair tape / 10" x 12 - 40" each
A collection of one hundred written accounts of a day in the life of one hundred mothers around the world. Each mother describes everything that happened over the course of a single day from midnight to midnight, and sends it to me. I type each one out on long strips of faded construction paper.
The collection includes entries from single mothers and married mothers, full-time working mothers and stay-at-home mothers, an exhausted mother of a newborn in Texas, and a mother of ten children in Israel. The accounts describe the usually overlooked cycles of the day; the juggling of parenting and everything else. It captures the events and the personal monologue of each day. Mother’s Days is a record of aloneness and togetherness; of the concurrent isolation and connectedness of the individual experience of motherhood, engaged in the same shared cycles of daily life, with different words, in different places.
Mother's Days was performed live at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in 2013. Three mothers concurrently read aloud the daily accounts of three other mothers so that activities that had happened at the same time (though in different lives) were spoken at once and blurred together. For much of the reading the woman up all night with her nine-week old baby spoke alone.
Made during An Artist Residency in Motherhood. Exhibited and performed at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, 2013.