Happy New Year! My brain has finally slowed down over the last few days and I’m finally feeling rested. Before Christmas I was in a fury of editing photos and submitting them to a few competitions, knowing that we would be leaving town for a week on Christmas Day. Then my obsessive thinking stayed in overdrive and I spent most of the week obsessing about whether we should move, and what kind of house we might want to move to, even though we can’t actually do anything about that until we come back from South Africa (which is only six weeks away btw!), and what kind of car we should buy for our second car. My camel’s back finally broke before Christmas, and I realized that with the pace and volume of work at my day job, being able to drive would help make me just a little bit less stressed. Hopefully it will buy me half an hour a day, to either slow down, work out a the gym, run an errand or two, and maybe even get the grocery shopping done during the week so our weekends can be a little bit less administrative. We have now chosen a car to buy, an inexpensive used car that should be reasonably reliable, at least for another 50,000 kms, and I didn’t spend that much time obsessing about it. Yay!

On the photography side, I posted two new galleries to my site. I finally settled on an edit of 18 images for Many Scars, and I wrote the statement. I used a quote from something I wrote when I first met John, and it made me a little sad that I don’t spend any time really writing anymore. I think I’d like to write more while I’m in the midst of a project.

The other gallery I posted is called Bricolage. I’ve been working on those images over the last year. It started with a desire to create work that expressed something about my experience of motherhood, but when I (re)discovered and put together Two-Powered, that need went away a little bit. Still, the intention turned my eye into my domestic realm, and I started noticing things I hadn’t noticed before, like the order and symmetry of my son’s play, the physical record of his need to understand and articulate rules of the world, and how the messiness of our home could be seen as a metaphor for the messiness of family relationships. I also felt the need to make photographs that show a truly messy home rather than small digestible portions of the mess arranged in a formally pleasing way or carefully staged representations of family chaos. I’m a little embarrassed by the mess we live in – I would never invite anyone over except my very best friend to this mess – but my first response to embarrassment is to internally declare that the embarrassment is unnecessary and I should sing it from the rooftops because surely at least one other person in the world must also experience this?

I love critique, so any criticism and commentary on the work is welcome.

And now I’m going to make banana bread with my son.