Mother Figure: 71 Self-Portraits In Isolation

During the first COVID-19 lockdown in Melbourne, I spent 71 consecutive days in self-isolation with my young family at home. I shot a self-portrait every day using only what I had on hand: myself, the kids, the house, the garden, the nearby creek. Isolating with young children brings heightened presence and purpose to these days. But there is also a darker underworld of more difficult experiences that need a space to be recognised: the desire to escape my house and family, anxiety about safety, grief, desperation, frustration, and overwhelm. Many of the images in this series are attempts to hold both the beauty and the darkness simultaneously, to condense a multi-layered feeling state into a visual artefact. Curiously, when I make an image about an “ugly” moment, often the grace that also lives inside it comes suddenly to light. A sense of the absurd or the surreal provides me a moment to breathe, to break through the quotidian, the daily grind, however briefly.