Madonna

There has been a few moments in my life when certain events has turned everything upside-down. The first of these experiences was my first day at 7th grade, the norwegian Junior high, I was fourteen yerars old. I suddenly became aware of the crowd around me in a very different way - I felt like I did not fit in, and made some big changes in my personality to fit in. The clothes, the hobbies, the way of speaking - everything was new and "better", and I tried my best to fit in for the following years. The next of these lifechangeing experiences came when I was eighteen. By that time there was not so much left of the person I was before that first day of Junior high. At 18 I became a young mother, and short after the birth, I became a single mother. That was in a time when I had tried so hard to be that "ideal someone", and suddenly I had to re-descover my identity as a mother. Surely I felt very young, confused and sometimes even helpless. Fast forward; Last autumn, in 2016, I started making these images. I was very aware that my oldes daughter was home for the last year - now - August 17, she moved out to attend highschool. I still feel very young, but I have managed to drop that ideal someone, and I am at this point more myself than I have been since that first day at junior high, twenty years ago. Although, I still think I am way to young to have my children moveing out. I am on a new breakingpoint in my identity. I fell into this body of work at the right time - the process has been challengeing, but with this work I have made something (good?) out of the situation. I do believe I have managed to express some of the feelings in the process of accepting my age, my motherhood, my personality and identity, the fact that my children are not mine to keep - just to raise and love. But it is a struggle. I call the series Madonna. She gives birth, and then she let go. I am the model in the portraits, and it is a personal body of work. The images are made with a homemade digital pinhole camera - I tend to grab a more difficult camera or style for the difficult images and stories I need to make. Print: digital inkjet on photo rag , in size A3+ Framed with vintage golden frames.