This body of work explores the complex relationships between mothers and their children. These relationships are based on a series of emotional and physical juxtapositions – simultaneous connection and separation, intimacy and disengagement, reliance and independence, idealization and reality. I photograph middle class, American families in an examination of the tension between a historically constructed maternal ideal and the social reality of motherhood. I draw inspiration from traditional representations of mothers and their child, specifically Madonna and Child iconography.

I use the home as a stage for domestic melodrama, constructing scenes that combine fictitious allegory and metaphor, historical maternal imagery, and observed events within the home. In combining traditional ideals and contemporary realities,I investigate the pervasiveness of maternal idealization, and the complexities and anxieties it creates for contemporary mothers.