How to be mum
Around my 40th birthday, I began to think about my mum and how different our lives are at this juncture. I was looking through a collection of family photos of her, mostly taken before I was born. In the images, she is between the age of 18 and 22, with one much later by myself as a child, when she must have been almost 37-40. I was especially drawn to certain gestures in which I saw something of myself but where there was a disparity.
I wanted to re-create the feeling of each gesture and so staged re-creations of the photograph in my reality. Through playful experiments, I began to weave the images together. I was struck by how powerful a meditative process it was; how I found myself exploring recollections of stories my parents would tell and my re-imagining of them both through childhood and now as an adult. 'How to be mum' is a response to this experience of the workings of memory and the role of the mother in creating identity.
