the motherhood that wasn’t
2020 - on going

Motherhood and fertility have been extensively represented in creative practice for both their pictorial qualities and in the documentation of lived experiences. These representations continue to play an important role in shaping public perceptions of womanhood, while infertility is underrepresented, silenced or deemed contentious – often framed in terms of lack or failure. The project the motherhood that wasn’t is grounded in my experiences of infertility and severe endometriosis and adenomyosis, as well as my recent hysterectomy. My experience as an infertile Brazilian-born woman with both Afro-Brazilian and European ancestry leads me to explore what this signifies in sociocultural, socioeconomic and sociohistorical contexts.

I recognise that endometriosis and infertility issues are complex, affecting those who are born with a female reproductive apparatus, and others who desire to experience motherhood. When using terms such as womanhood and motherhood, I am largely speaking from my own representative subject position as a biologically assigned female and self-identifying woman, possessing a body that menstruated and, if fertile, would give birth as a woman. This is the natural outcome of contextualising and drawing from my personal experiences. However, I wholeheartedly connect with, and acknowledge others also experiencing infertility and endometriosis from other (un)gendered perspectives.

Using my menstrual blood as a drawing medium, I exploit the evocative capacities of its materiality to shape the imaginary outside of traditional paradigms of birthing and mothering. I use my practice to identify the discrepancies I find between idealised notions of motherhood and the traditional constructions of female identity in which a woman’s worth is measured against her reproductive capacity, and the realities of lived experiences. 

With my project, I aim to address the underrepresentation of infertility by offering a perspective that is anchored in my lived experience and resists regulatory patriarchal conventions, as well as resisting the racially marked Latina body with its attendant hypersexualised stereotypes. I call into question the pervasive but covert ways in which infertility is presented as the woman’s failing, a defect in her gender. I seek alternative possibilities for imagining the infertile womb as nevertheless capable of alternative forms of creation, thus contributing an affective, empathic response to an issue that is subjugated by shame and underrepresented in the creative and public spheres.

ouroboros, 2023
Self-portrait and my frozen menstrual blood