Self Portraits

I started taking self-portraits two years ago when I realised there was so much I wanted to be able to tell my children about our lives and so that I could carve out a space for creativity whilst being a mother around the clock. I never could have anticipated what this journey would come to mean to me. I started by only capturing the prettier moments of our lives and the areas of our home I liked, but quickly realised there is beauty to be found in the exhausting days and the areas of our home which aren't so typically beautiful. Realising that the dark circles beneath my eyes and the tears in them are the medals of motherhood, and that our children don't want to remember a perfect home but want to remember one in which they were loved and met their milestones. Stretch marks I once worried about have become silvery lines that catch the light beautifully and my children trace with their fingers. My rounder stomach has become a comfortable place for my children to rest their heads and is no longer something I worry about. These have been just some of the gifts given to me along this journey. As a photographer, there is much more of the world I would like to see and to photograph but for now, motherhood is my entire life and legacy so I felt compelled to tell our story. It's a quiet story but one filled with daily challenges both emotional and physical. I believe that no matter how different we may be, motherhood unites all of us who have experienced it and in this way it is entirely timeless and relatable. These are the stories I try to tell through my images. As a mother who is home most days with two children it is very difficult for me to explain, even to a wonderful and supportive partner, what I have done with my day or what it looked like - these images have given me a way to make sense of it all. And when I don't have the energy for words I am able to explain what motherhood and our everyday means to me with images that can tell the story better than I can - because I'm usually too damn tired to string the words together.