essays & writing

MFA Project Proposal (Matrescence: Becoming Mother Nature)

REVERB: Transfiguration

Matrescence: An Artist Giving Birth to themself

how organizations are like art projects

Project Notes (9/18/24): A poem

Grief, Ghosts, lamentations

REVERB: Hope

“Matrescence: Becoming Mother Nature”

Alexia Casiano
Project Proposal: Fall 2023
MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing, CIIS

Abstract:

Exploring monumental transition, creation, and sacred healing, “Matrescence: Becoming Mother Nature” is a collection of artworks in an environmental context that explores the birth of a mother, the relationship between grief, healing, and nature, and a new outlook on climate resilience. The work seeks to highlight the parallels between becoming a parent and the sacrifices made by the earth in bearing and sustaining humanity. The artist investigates how to rediscover connection with nature even in the midst of human interferance, and searches for space and time for rest and reconnection with the body in order to heal the soul. The archetypal “inner child” emerges in this work to help find bridges between the past and present, grief and joy. Examples of work include text-based paintings which question the nature of trauma, grief, and identity; woven canopies, nests, and blankets made of reclaimed cardboard, plastic, and textiles (as well as natural materials such as grasses, leaves, and mud) which conceptually speak to a mother’s desire to protect, nurture – and rest. Installing the artwork in the artist’s own backyard highlights the vulnerability and temporality of life and the importance of reckoning with the environment that we live in, while deepening inquiry into the changes that materials face over time – both becoming more resilient, and being reclaimed by nature. “Matrescence: Becoming Mother Nature” aims to further conversations with parents, caregivers, and the larger community about climate resilience, transitions and major life changes, and intergenerational healing. 

Project Scope:
“Matrescence: Becoming Mother Nature” is an art installation project composed of sculptures, paintings, and installations exploring the seismic transition through gestation and birth, and how the connections between past and future generations are related to the inner child, personal and collective healing, and survival in a changing climate. 

This work is both personal and universal. It’s about the transition to parenthood, but also about identity, trauma, grief, healing; mental, physical, and spiritual wellness—and climate resiliency. A mother’s body needs rest to heal the traumas of gestation and childbirth, and the earth needs time to rest and recover as well.

The full body of work will include pieces about pregnancy, childbirth, and (re)finding one’s identity as an adult/parent, woven together with a deeper understanding of nature and the future of the planet our children will inherit. More universally, the project contains themes of experiencing a major transition, and marking time as life (and the environment) changes around and within us. 

The  work will be installed over the next year in the artists’ backyard and documented during installation, with the intention of hosting an exhibition “opening” and inviting the community. The vulnerability and temporality of an outdoor exhibition poses unique challenges yet also highlights the urgency of reckoning with the environment that we live in and protecting it for future generations. Furthermore, the process of building temporary structures and sourcing the materials and tools necessary to complete the final project in this location requires collaboration with other artists, builders, and neighbors. The completed exhibition will also include a participatory creative project, including space for participants to reflect and contribute personal experiences. By working with the community to bring this project to fruition, “Matrescence” aims to further conversations with other parents, caregivers, and the community about climate resilience and intergenerational healing.

Why this work?
“Matrescence”–becoming a mother–is a term first used by American medical anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973 and more recently studied and expanded on by psychologist Aurelie Athan and others (see bibliography). Matrescence, like adolescence, is a developmental stage that lasts for years (or, arguably, a lifetime). It encompassing the periods of “pre-conception, pregnancy and birth, surrogacy or adoption, to the postnatal period and beyond… The scope of the changes encompasses multiple domains – bio-psycho-social-political-spiritual” (Athan, matrescence.com). 

This project was born out of the artists’ desire to deeply process and understand the inner change emerging from a major life transition – birthing a person, and the simultaneous rebirth of artistic identity – and the parallels to the external changes that the earth is enduring due to human activity and climate change. The resulting multimedia explorations cover a range of emotions and themes including grief, horror, fear, anxiety, rage, joy, and the relationship to time (gestation, aging, a changing climate, past and future generations). 

Artist’s Statement:
As an artist, parent, and MFA student, I grapple with limited time and space in addition to larger questions of meaning in my work. I wanted to work on a larger scale and to explore installation work. I have a philosophy of creative reuse and always look first to what is already available – I realized that could apply to space as well as materials. 

I currently have limited indoor studio space, but a large backyard. I became intrigued by the interplay between the materials and the environment: cardboard that I left outside would get rained on, and actually seemed to mold to the structures I was building more easily after getting wet and drying out multiple times. The material became more flexible and tougher in some ways, while also becoming vulnerable to mold and deterioration. I became curious about constructing elements of sculptures out of paper pulp and leaving them outside – how long would they take to disintegrate, for instance? The interplay of materiality and time evokes for me both grief and excitement: a way to express the changes that take place during major life transitions. 

Working outside also forced me to contend with the environment in a way that I normally am shielded from. As a society we have become so accustomed to avoiding the realities of the natural world (rain, sun, bugs) and as we continue to contend with climate change, we are apt to hide inside even more – from smoke and fires, extreme heat and extreme storms. I believe we can’t really understand and adapt to climate change until we learn how to accept the natural world in general. 

The environment that we live in is the home that we all share. Climate change affects the very air we breathe and the weather patterns we experience; no one is immune, but marginalized communities are far more affected (both locally, at the neighborhood level, and globally, particularly in the global south and island nations). As I think about my responsibilities as a parent, I think more about my responsibilities to the environment as well. I want to build an outdoor gallery/installation because it engages the viewer with these questions of environmental exposure and the passage of time. We are all here for a limited time; what do we want to leave behind? I want these thoughts to underscore the powerful messages of transformation in the works themselves, just as climate change is the undercurrent of everything we do. 

I have always been drawn to using recycled materials and reusing found objects in my work. As a child, we were taught to “recycle, reduce, reuse,” and I learned to look at empty packaging as raw materials for creating something new. As an adult, I grapple with the amount of stuff that we buy, and the packaging that it leaves in its wake. In the context of a global pandemic and then a pregnancy, I found myself ordering more things online, and the cardboard boxes piled up. I feel both guilty about and enthralled by all this raw material, and my inner child gets excited about seeing what we can make from this trash – making something from “nothing” – though there is always a hidden cost in what gets discarded and returned to the elements.

As I’ve transitioned to parenthood, I think more and more about what I’m teaching my child about consumerism, and about how the environment is changing (largely because of capitalism and global companies), and what kind of a world my child will grow up in. Climate change starts with everything we manufacture and buy, how we get around, what we eat, and how we live – and the governments that regulate (or don’t) the factories that support our lifestyles – but it affects how we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, animals and ecosystems, how much we can enjoy the outdoors, and our quality of life. For millions of people around the globe, climate change costs them their livelihoods and lives. 

What can you or I do to interrupt this cycle? How can we address our own, and our children’s, growing sense of climate anxiety? One place that I am able to address these issues and start building hope and climate resilience is transforming trash into art that can spark conversations. The term “climate resilience” encompasses both emotional coping strategies (ie, acceptance) and practical solutions to mitigate climate change and adapt to new environments. I think about how I will help my child understand their environmental context and build climate resiliency, in the same way I am learning how to breathe life into sculptures and installations that can literally weather the storms. I can’t help but think not just of her future, but generations past and future as well. We are all connected, but life for future generations is uncertain. As I heal from the transformation my body has endured through childbirth and parenting, I dream of rest and healing for the earth itself.


Materials
The majority of the individual pieces in this installation are (or will be) made from recycled materials (primarily cardboard, but also plastic, textiles, reclaimed wood, tin from formula cans, etc.) and/or readily available natural materials (such as grasses, branches, leaves, and mud). It is extremely difficult to recycle everything that we buy as parents, or to always use reusable or sustainable products. There is a huge paradox, even a hypocritical nature, to parenting in the first world while being concerned about climate change. This paradox drives the choices of materials, with careful consideration of what needs to be purchased new for this project and what can be sourced from discarded materials, packaging, and sustainable sources (such as Seattle ReCreative, a local creative re-use store that sells secondhand materials). 

The work is visually unified through repeated use of raw cardboard as a material (and a color, closely related to the color of earth), with contrasting brightly-colored elements (which may include acrylic paint, string and fabric) representative of childhood, playfulness, and innocence.

Audience
The prospective in-person audience is the artist’s local community – neighbors, artists, students, parents, teachers, and those interested in climate resilience. The documentation and online exhibition materials, posted on a website dedicated to this project, will be available to all adults interested in the visual arts, especially those interested in the relationship among parents, children, inner children, past and future generations, and environmental work. The hope and intention is that this work will be relatable to everyone, not just parents; a chance for connection and conversation for everyone who views it. 

These are universal themes because everyone has been a child; everyone has had parents (or dealt with their absence); everyone is connected to past generations, and will eventually leave this world to future generations. Everyone is affected by the changing climate. Everyone grapples with their own mental health, sense of identity, and how to survive and thrive in this world. Everyone has experienced or will experience some major transition(s) in their lives – whether or not it involves becoming a parent. This project poses an interest in what we all share through those experiences of major life transition, and how we re-find ourselves in the process. 

Specific audience subsets who may be interested in this work include: new parents; prospective parents; those who raise or work with infants or small children; the birth community; those seeking to heal from past trauma or reconnect with their inner child; people interested in exploring the nature of the body, the self, and identity; anyone concerned about climate change and the fate of future generations.

Themes:
Themes include: transitions, change, gestation, birth, the body, identity, childhood, the inner child, lineage, generations, trauma, mental health, grief, safety, rest, and healing; connections and community; time and space; climate change, environmental awareness and climate resilience.

Zones of Inquiry:

• How are the sacrifices of a parent/birth parent similar to the sacrifices of the Earth in bearing humanity?

• What spaces does a (birth) parent have to simply rest and heal?

• Are we “children” of the Earth? When and how does the Earth get to rest and heal?

• What does “trans-” mean to you? Transition, transformation, transfiguration, transgendered, transubstantiation — what do these things all have in common?

• What is a major transformation that you have been through? How has it changed you? In what ways can you sit with that change, either metaphorically or physically, in space and time?

• How, as artists, can we capture the passage of time, and dwell in the temporal and ephemeral?

• Is healing a spiritual experience? What is the role of pain and grief in healing, joy, and wholeness?

• What is the relationship between past and future generations? 

• What can children teach us about ourselves and the natural world? 

• What can nature teach us about letting go, giving in, resting, and healing?

• Where does the “inner child” reside in relation to one’s own children?

• What can the accumulation of raw materials – cardboard, tin cans, bottles, plastic – tell us about our own lives? Are these materials “free”?

• Can trash as a material be used to understand grief and resilience in the face of climate change? 

• How can climate resilience be a metaphor for emotional and spiritual healing of our own personal and generational traumas?

• How can tending to the emerging mother serve as a metaphor for healing the earth?

Image Samples (work by Alexia Casiano)

Annotated Bibliography:

Athan, Aurélie, Ph.D. www.matrescence.com

I am a clinical psychologist and faculty member at Teachers College, Columbia University where I revive the term Matrescence through teaching and writing. Our graduate-level courses and certificate program in Reproductive Psychology are the first of their kind.  I study mothers' development holistically, both their thriving and distress, and offer an empowering, strengths-based approach to normalize the transition to motherhood. I am in private practice and consult with women of all ages as well as professionals working to improve the wellbeing of mothers. 

“In my expanded definition, the process of becoming a mother or matrescence, the term first coined by Dana Raphael, Ph.D. (1973) and which I later built upon, is a developmental passage where a woman transitions through pre-conception, pregnancy and birth, surrogacy or adoption, to the postnatal period and beyond. The exact length of matrescence is individual, recurs with each child, and may arguably last a lifetime! The scope of the changes encompasses multiple domains --bio-psycho-social-political-spiritual-- and can be likened to the developmental push of adolescence. Increased attention to mothers has spurred new findings, from neuroscience to economics, and supports the rationale for a new field of study known as matrescence. Such an arena would allow the roundtable of specialists to come together and advance our understanding of this life passage.”

Athan, Aurelie. “Matrescence: the emerging mother.” Medium, March 8, 2019, https://medium.com/@ama81/matrescence-the-emerging-mother-69d1699ff0cc

“while interviewing new mothers about their daily experiences, they had noticeable difficulty articulating the magnitude of this life-altering transition.”

Assler-Alvey, Robin (artist) https://www.robinassner-alvey.com

• I follow this photographer/artist on Instagram and am enthralled by her use of her own body (particularly in her “Motherhood”, “All Touched Out,” and “Untitled (Image Transfers)” series), transformed and yet more a more “real” depiction of herself in some ways and how she feels after long days of mothering. I see this as a departure point for alternative self-portraits, as well as inspiration for building a whole from fragments and disjointed pieces. 

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas, Penguin Classics, 2014.

• recommended by previous mentor, Chris Dorosz. Partially read; love the ideas, but it’s a bit dense. Continue reading and see if it influences my perspective on taking up space in the backyard.

Barrera, Jazmina. Linea Negra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes. (book) Translated by Christina MacSweeney, Two Lines Press, 2022.

• I came across this during research while I was pregnant, and read it primarily during delirious middle-of-the-night pumping sessions after having Nova. The style is spare, fragmented, and completely fitting with the experiences of pregnancy and new parenting, which is what Barrera is also capturing, while weaving in the fascinating art history and legacy of a little-known artists’ model and artist in Mexico. 

Buteyn, Kaylan. The Artist Mother Podcast https://artistmotherpodcast.com & Artist Caregiver Network. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artistmotherpodcast

• The Artist Mother IG account has been an inspiration to me since before I even had a child. They introduced me to so many incredible artists. I recently discovered their Thrive Together Network and am considering joining this online source for collaboration and community between artist-caregivers for inspiration and support with others in similar situations, learning how to thrive as artists with limited time, attention, and resources. 

Carpenter, Tara, et al. (Heidi Moller Somsen and Kaylan Buteyn), editors. An Artist and a Mother. (essays) Demeter Press, 2023.

• amazing, so needed (for me, and I imagine, others). Individual artists from the Artist Mother Network share stories about their artistic journeys and how they coexist with their parenting experiences and responsibilities.

Chinchilla Moreno, Izaskun, “Eco-Friendly Pop-up Architecture,” (course) Domestika, domestika.org

• After ten years of participating in lots of competitions (I won more than 30 awards), the financial crisis hit - about the same time I became a mother. I finally decided to take a proactive role in the construction of my own projects.

• projects that are short-term, low-budget, freshly made, fast, sometimes temporary

• her book - “The Caring City” - ecologically and socially conscious; designers taking back the city

• find people that can help us materialize our thinking

• design and build with recycled and hacked products

Delgado, Elizabeth (healing justice practitioner, community organizer, and wellbeing strategist). Colectiva Wellness & Healing https://colectivawellbeing.com/. 

• Attended Elizabeth’s Community Call focused on Ancestral Healing, hosted by Rockwood Leadership Institute, November 30, 2023. 

• Guided meditations deepened connections to specific ancestors and inherited resilience strategies.

  “Elizabeth identifies as a Taino-Borikua, queer, disabled, neurodivergent human whose life purpose is creating healing justice spaces and teaching effective wellness and resilience practices for the empowerment of those experiencing stress and systemic oppression. Whether in the workplace, community or individual setting.”

Englund, Pam. Birthing from Within (revised). Partera Press, 2010.

• powerful source for translating the emotional and physical transition of birth into artmaking as a means of processing. 

Goldsworthy, Andy. (artist) https://andygoldsworthystudio.com

• Lubow, Arthur. “36 Who Made a Difference: Andy Goldsworthy” (article) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/35-who-made-a-difference-andy-goldsworthy-114067437/ November 2005

• environmental art; nests; temporal art

Hahn, Thich Nhat. You are Here: Discovering the magic of the present moment. 2001. Translated by Sherab Chodzin Hohn, Shambhala Publications, 2009. 

• source of inspiration and experiential research for me, as I’ve realized that meditation and presence is such an important part of what I’m working on and creating. 
  
  
  

Hattam, Nasim. (senior journalist, BBC) “Matrescence: The birth of a mother.” (video; 05:17) August 2023 - Rituals, traditions and the reality of early motherhood around the world.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/peopleandplaces/matrescence-the-birth-of-a-mother/vi-AA1fItnH 

The word “matrescence” was first coined by American medical anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973 (who also popularized the term “doula”). It describes the physical, psychological, and emotional changes of becoming a mother, “and has been largely unexplored in the medical community.”

“our society is failing new mothers” (Lucy Jones)

Hayhoe, Katherine. Saving Us: A climate scientist’s case for hope and healing in a divided world. Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2021.

• I read this in 2021 and it catalyzed my commitment to weaving climate awareness into all of my artmaking as much as possible. Hayhoe makes the case that the majority of people DO care, but alarmism about climate change often causes overwhelm that leads to shutting down and turning away from the issue because it feels too big to solve. Her research shows that one thing that everyone can do to help is to share conversations about the changing climate – through whatever means they have, to connect through whatever others care about. I realized that I am an artist, and I can start conversations from that place. 

Hersey, Tricia. Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. Little Brown Spark, 2022

• This book is critical in reframing the power of rest. Refusing to engage in systems of capitalism, grind culture, and white supremacy by slowing down, resting, relaxing. I was intrigued to find out that Hersey (a theologian and founder of The Nap Ministry) is also a performance artist. Her work speaks to rest as a spiritual solution to grief, an approach to healing that is both simple and revolutionary. 

Heti, Sheila. Motherhood. Picador, 2019.

• Carolyn suggested this during mentorship, and I found it profound in wrestling with the monumental shifts in thinking around parenting before even having a child (or possibly never having a child). It solidified for me the importance of the interior transformation.

Jones, Lucy. Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood. Penguin, 2023

• Excited to track the publication of this new book! My understanding is that it is a research text on the evolution of the study of matrescence as well as the author’s personal experiences. Unfortunately it just came out and is currently only available in the UK; I pre-ordered a copy and the US version ships May 2024. 

• Update: listening to the audiobook (August-October 2024) and it is incredibly beautiful, fascinating, and vital source of information and resonance with my personal experiences as well as my zones of inquiry for this project.

Keenan, Annabel “Whose Mother is Nature, Anyway?” (article) Hyperallergic, November 2022. https://hyperallergic.com/782324/im-not-your-mother-ppow-gallery

• Contextualizes the idea of “mother nature” as comparative to actual mothers; both are sucked dry, depleted, and left exhausted and burnt out. 

“Motherhood, like nature, is not an endless resource. They are, however, both renewable if given the chance to regenerate and restore.”

“I’m Not Your Mother” (group exhibition), PPOW Gallery, October 28-December 2, 2022. https://www.ppowgallery.com/exhibitions/im-not-your-mother#tab:thumbnails;tab-1:slideshow

P·P·O·W is pleased to present I’m Not Your Mother, a group exhibition bringing together early landscapes by Carolee Schneemann with contemporary artists whose compositions reject misogynistic and romanticized depictions of nature and grapple honestly with the realities of our natural world today. Including works by Grace Carney, Jasper Francis Cropsey, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jacci Den Hartog, Brook Hsu, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Daniel Correa Mejía, Nohemí Pérez, Mira Schor, TARWUK, and Robin F. Williams, I’m Not Your Mother questions how we define motherhood and its damaging consequences for bodies both feminized and ecological.

Knott, Sarah. Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History. Sarah Crichton Books, 2019.

• both a history of maternity (pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood) and a memoir. “As a memoir, Mother Is a Verb becomes a method of asking new questions and probing lost pasts in order to historicize the smallest, even the most mundane of human experiences. Is there a history to interruption, to the sound of an infant’s cry, to sleeplessness? Knott finds answers not through the telling of grand narratives, but through the painstaking accumulation of a trellis of anecdotes. And all the while, we can feel the child on her hip.”

Lamott, Anne. Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year. Anchor, 2005. 

• This book has been an inspiration to me for years; a funny and brilliant transformation of the hardships of early parenting into art and inspiration for others. Also a reminder to bring some levity and joy to the art!

Love, Jena. (Artist) “The Absurdity of Pregnancy and Motherhood” series. https://www.jenahlove.com/absurdity

• takes an unflinching stance at documenting the dull and repetitive realities of motherhood (like photographing every dirty diaper for a year), with a beautiful sarcastic humor and wit

May, Katherine. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. Riverhead Books, 2020. 

• Philosophically aligned with the concept rest as a literal and metaphorical retreat from “normal” life during times of difficulty and/or transition. 

McCahon, Nikki. The Dear Mama Podcast, “Healing the Mother Wound with Bethany Webster,” S1:E29 (46:54), 20 April 2020. https://www.nikkimccahon.com/

Episode description: Bethany is a writer, transformational coach and international speaker. Her work has filled a crucial gap in our understanding of women’s lives by blending cutting-edge research on intergenerational trauma, feminist theory, and psychology to comprehensively define the Mother Wound.

McCahon, Nikki. Discovering Matrescence. (eBook) Dear Mama Pty Ltd, 2019-2022.

• “Becoming a mother leaves no woman as it found her; it unravels her and rebuilds her; it cracks her open; it takes her to her edges. It’s both beautiful and brutal, often at the same time.“

Odell, Jenny. How to do Nothing. Melville House, 2020. 

- Rest; bioregionalism; community and connection. So inspirational! Feels very pertinent to the work. 

Raphael, Dana. "Matrescence, Becoming a Mother, A “New/Old” Rite de Passage". Being Female: Reproduction, Power, and Change, edited by Dana Raphael, De Gruyter Mouton, 1975, pp. 65-72. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110813128.65

• Looking for the original source of the term “matrescence”; I can’t read the full excerpt here but will keep looking. 

Sacks, Alexandra. “A new way to think about motherhood.” TED talk. May 2018. (06:17)

https://www.ted.com/talks/alexandra_sacks_a_new_way_to_think_about_the_transition_to_motherhood

• people don’t have the framework for what is “normal” and a lot of the ambivalence and hardships of early parenthood are confused for a more serious condition: postpartum depression. 

• when a baby is born, so is a mother; each unsteady in their own way.

Simmons, Jeanne K. (artist) https://jeanneksimmons.com/projects

• land art; photography; environmental art; body and fields; woven grass

• besides being beautiful and conceptually important art, Simmons is a reminder to me of the prevalence of the female body in especially performance art, which is conceptually a form dedicated to the ephemeral (inherently associated with time and loss) - ie Yoko Ono, “Cut Piece”

Union of Concerned Scientists, “What is Climate Resilience?” (article)  6 June 2022, https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/what-climate-resilience

• “Climate resilience is about successfully coping with and managing the impacts of climate change while preventing those impacts from growing worse.”  

Weller, Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief. North Atlantic Books, 2015. 

• recommended to me by a friend; still reading it. The work I’m making is so much about grief and healing, and so far this book is very relevant to connecting personal grief and healing with grief over the destruction of the climate and how to find collective emotional healing.