Mothers go to extraordinary lengths for their children. For “Hidden Mother Photography” in Victorian times, shutter speeds were sometimes up to 30 seconds long so mothers would hide within the picture to hold their children still. Mothers revealed and concealed themselves, in order to create a “permanent document” of their children’s “identities”. This emotional labor is considered “invisible labor” because it is unpaid, undervalued, and often goes unnoticed in our culture. Instead of concealing their identity, I propose that the emotional labor these mothers perform actually REVEALS much about their identity–their ingenuity, inventiveness, commitment, and emotional labor and strength. My “moving portrait of emotional labor” pictures the process of photographic portraiture. I reenact their labor, along with enacting my own, as I pay tribute to the unpaid “hidden” labor of mothers that is performed universally, continually, unfailingly, throughout the world, thus monumentalizing it as collective and “visible”.
Artist & Educator, based in Santa Cruz, CA. My recent creative work involves "Intertwined HerStories" reenacting and enacting the unpaid and paid labor of women, including my own from lived experience. I am interested in working in the space of absurdity that emerges at the point of disconnect between the seemingly coded/structured/ordered/production-based space of technology and the messy/complex/idiosyncratic space of humanity. And the ways in which working with and creating technology illuminates our humanness, including our biases.
Sarah Buckius 