Yellow rattle

The first six weeks post partum is known as the golden month—a period of rest, warmth and healing. It is also when a momentous hormonal crash occurs as the body grapples with its recently cleaved state, often inducing depression, intense fatigue and delirium. The yellow in Stephanie O’Connor’s series Yellow Rattle takes on golden pallor that dwells both in the warmth of sunrise and glistening colostrum, while at times erring into the sickly, choleric chartreuse of the body: jaundice, infection, iodine, urine, bile, bruised flesh. Taken during the early months of her own post-partum period, O’Connor’s eye trains towards clinically sharp angles - an inhospitable realm of light and shadow. Quick collisions of light, shade, colour and form echo the hard rattle of infant playthings, a source of developmental joy that over time grates the listener’s ear. Domestic settings are rendered uncanny in twilight hours as the birthing body is bound to the home and new life’s day blurs into night. The house becomes a world—the hallway a street, the lamp a sun. Faces are bleary and obscured by shadow—at times inverted as seen in night-vision—as the birthing self is unmoored from past realities. The baby itself is alien yet ethereal, light seemingly pouring from (or into) their small pink mouth. The mouth itself is open as if singing, or ready to receive nourishment. Also named for a semi-parasitic grassland wildflower whose seed-pods rattle in the autumn, and when crushed into an essence is used to assuage melancholia, Yellow Rattle is the final chapter in O’Connor’s three-part series surveying their experience of pregnancy and the post-partum period: Reigning toward Aries was made during conception; The waves came in like horses while O’Connor’s baby grew in utero. The yellow-rattle flower is implemented by farmers to feed off and deplete vigorous grasses, eventually allowing more delicate species to thrive. Perhaps, adjacently, the birthing body (and mind) is depleted by the growth of a baby, and yet, with its birth, the physical and mental emptying of the self might permit a new kind of seed to germinate.