Book Description

Shortlisted for the 2020 Lucie Foundation Prototype Book Prize, the Perimeter International Book Prize for PHOTO2021 and awarded silver for the 2020 BIFA Documentary Photo Book Prize, The Quickening is a record of an ambivalent and fraught journey through the first year of motherhood and the postpartum period.This unique and handmade book has a limited run of 250 copies, redolent of the number of days of gestation before the premature birth of the author's son. Additionally, 30 special editions were created to reflect the number of days left until the child's projected due date. Prior to publishing, the project has won multiple recognitions, including honorable mention in the Julia Margaret Cameron Award, a finalist place in the Vevey Images Grand Prix, participation in the celebrated group show titled, "Birth," at TJ Boulting Gallery in London and a solo show at Rencontres d'Arles in France in 2019.The Quickening explores the transformation and lived experience of a woman in her motherhood/matrescence and postpartum depression/anxiety. The work interrogates the under-represented transition of biological, psychological and social identity during a complex and yet ubiquitous phase of life.You begin your life in expansion. From rolling to crawling to walking, your reach moves outwards from infancy through to adulthood. At the cusp of motherhood, everything instantaneously moves in reverse. Your world begins to shrink, to coalesce into the tight sphere of domestic life. What was once the sun is now the light in your living room. What was once the road, becomes the hallway to the bathroom. Everyone you once knew, becomes the squalling baby in your arms, suddenly unknowable, inconsolable and opaque in their needs and wants. As the external landscape of your old world shifts from mountains to lakes, the change also begins within. In increments and then suddenly faster and faster, you become internally unrecognizable. The task of navigating this new geography, the new days and nights, how you eat, how you sleep, how you love - this seismic transition - is called "matresence".The Quickening details the claustrophobia, myopia, paradoxical loneliness and luminance of this transformative time.