Shrinking Anxieties
Shrinking Anxieties is a project about Children's Mental Health during Covid 19. As an artist and mother, most artwork about mothering is about pregnancy or babies. It feels sometimes like people lose interest as soon as the baby leaves the breast. I'm seeking to discuss mothering children during Covid. My son developed extreme anxieties during quarantine. This manifested in an imaginary friend. It took my partner and I months to decode these stories and understand, even the little we can, what my son was going through.
The video shows me, the mother, trying to shrink his anxieties and control this unknowable situation.
Keepsakes
My work continuously uses materials from childhood to explore what mother's seek to, but are unable to control during motherhood. Each piece of the dialogue with my son is handwritten on a shrinky dink.
Keepsakes
The shrinky dinks can be displayed one by one in small coin cases to slow the intake of these intimate conversations, now cherished in flocked boxes as keepsakes. They can also, depending on space, be taken in all together in the shadow box style pictured.