love’s labor by Eleanor Oakes

Issue 177

As a photographic artist my studio practice reconsiders a feminist view of art history to address urgent issues of care, specifically around mothering and climate change. Current research captures these themes by innovating one of the first photographic processes ever invented, the salt print, by using material explorations with natural and artificial salts to create works that are specific to person, time, and place.

love’s labor is an ongoing project that utilizes mother’s breastmilk as a salting solution to make prints that reflect on nourishment, bodily memory as transferred through ancestry, and society’s reliance on the unsupported labor of parenting. Breastmilk adds bodily labor to the print, while also injecting a uniquely feminist narrative into the history of photography. The wide range of color and tonal discrepancies displayed by salt prints are amplified when using this unhomogenized organic material. Each print is unique as tonal shifts and fat splatters swirl like small galaxies. These differences remind us that our bodies are not machines, but imperfect organisms. They encourage acceptance and understanding while countering the harmful perfectionist rhetoric engrained in the photographic medium.

This work has collaborated with forty other mothers to date. Each mother is taught to coat paper in their own breastmilk, introducing their hand to the print. Images of family and community gardens are additionally included to honor the mothers’ own practices of care, as well as to reference continued nourishment through the land and the tension between the presumptive ‘natural’ experience of parenting in simultaneous conjunction and conflict with the environment.

While the fabric for much of my practice is rooted in my own lost memories, my visual research weaves these threads together to explore communal and intersectional care. Our modern society overlooks care as something frivolous and sequestered, but this work exposes care as a necessary building block, the key to meaningful connection to each other and our environment.

Eleanor Oakes (she/her) lives and works in Detroit, Michigan.
www.eleanoroakes.com| @eleanoroakes