Tender Ruptures: An Archive of the Mothering Body, 2025
Embossings on paper
Dimensions variable

Tender Ruptures reflects on the embodied experiences of women, positioning the female body as a living archive of personal and generational histories. This series continues my inquiry into the nuances of womanhood and the ways in which memory, trauma, and transformation inscribe themselves onto and through the body.

Employing a range of printmaking techniques—including blind embossing, papermaking, mixed-media monoprint, Chine-collé, and image transfer—the works draw from the metaphor of the matrix (mother) and the print (child). These methods evoke what Elizabeth Grosz describes as the body’s capacity to "inscribe and be inscribed," functioning as both subject and surface, archive and agent. The matrix here is not merely a reproductive vessel but a generative space—textural, material, and affective—holding traces of what has passed through it.

The selected works in this exhibition mark the early phase of this ongoing series. They originated from a period when I experienced speech impairment after my child turned one and a half—a rupture that produced a dissonance between cognition and expression, further complicating communication in domestic life. Informed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment, these pieces seek to render visible the body's silent language—how it speaks through sensation, gesture, and absence. The use of subtle embossings and layered image transfers invites close inspection, mirroring the intricacies of lived experience that often remain unseen or unspoken.

By surfacing these hidden narratives, Tender Ruptures opens a space for reflecting on visibility, silence, and the embodied labor of care. In doing so, the series contributes to a broader feminist dialogue on gender, corporeality, and identity.