This print is a high quality, fine art print created on Canson Edition Etching paper, which has a soft, textured matte look and feel.
The print is offered with the white border shown - so it will fit directly into an 8x10 or 11x14 frame if you so choose to frame it.
I created this piece in the third trimester of my wild pregnancy, as I would often bathe or lay in bed and meditate, or travel internally, pondering the creative and gestational power of this time. It was as if my entire world was unfurling like a cosmic garden in my mind's eye, up and around me and my womb, like an auric field of power. I believe the creative power of women to be inherently bound to our bodies, and this art honors that incredible journey and rite of passage.
I created this piece specifically as a balm to my own wounds around breastfeeding, and as a prayer for my upcoming second journey with my new baby. I strove to express just how powerful this endeavor is - how we can move through grief, struggle, and pain and cultivate so much nourishment, beauty, and resilience for our children and families. Women make the world.
The fairies represent our "fairy" grandmothers, watching over us and supporting us in our silent and enduring journeys through night and day as we re-learn how to have intact motherbaby relationships.
An ode to breastfeeding from Emily Hancock (theworkofwomen.substack.com):
"To nurse a baby is to be a bridge. A bridge from womb to world. From astral unknowns to Earthly delight. From soul to soul.
The milk we make is not neutral, it is wholesomeness made tangible, is is goodness manifest. In a place and time so wrought with malignant sterility, being a beacon of bountiful nourishment and vital abundance is a crown on our heads, a reminder of what we are made of, a blessing of servitude.
Making milk is an act of care and devotion to beauty,
to the feminine, to the earth and to the flowers, to the sweet souls we may bridge from the before that exists within us to the after that is life.
Bare-breasted, swollen, sticky and round, the new mother does the work of every women before, a living prayer full of ancestral love, giving with no bounds. Made of blood, alchemized into overflowing gentleness.
Just as we water the wheat field in order to eat well, we nurse our babies so that they may live well. Mother’s milk is a devotion to hope."
May this piece protect, honor, and comfort you as you journey within and without on the path of motherhood.