Morning Routine in Motherhood
I shared this post with @artistmotherpodcast a few weeks ago and wanted to share here as well. The full video can be viewed on my website. hollydgray.com
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Hello 👋 Holly D. Gray (@hollydgray) here! I’m excited to share my art and life with the A/M community today. Even though my art practice and education started well before I became a mother, my story begins in 2007 when our daughter was born prematurely with a rare birth defect. As you can imagine, my art practice came to a halt during this challenging time.
After ten years of full-time caregiving, living in hospitals, and no art practice to speak of, I returned to graduate school for my MFA in 2016. Art (and life) before and after my daughter’s birth are as different as day and night. Every ounce of my art practice is influenced by my unique and mostly isolating journey of motherhood.
I primarily work in photography, video, sculpture, and mixed media. All of my ideas start photographically and conceptually. The ideas come first and then I decide how I can speak to that idea in the best way. My mind is constantly planning and churning and I largely enjoy this side of my artist’s brain.
The video short here is titled Morning Routine in Motherhood. This is a one-hour and eight-minute video consisting of the documentation of seven mornings. One week, all the same, and yet slightly different. While developing this video I was processing my morning routine as the primary caregiver to a disabled child and the gendered assumptions, as a female, chosen for me from birth. Equally, this video is a silent commentary on caregiving, repetition, monotony, and parenting burnout. The pressures of keeping up a time-based, strict, clean, and mistake-free environment are life-altering. Without this morning routine, my child would not survive.
