artist statement:
The ongoing series, “communion”, transubstantiates slippery memories of breastfeeding my son into monumental, vivid, and experientially truthful paintings. My aim is to faithfully record nursing my baby - our latched bodies, my pleasure in caretaking, and the intensity of my fear and anxiety - before time unwinds us.
My first memory is the sensation of nursing in my mother’s arms - soft flesh, sweet milk, and safety. Breastfeeding is a definitively finite relationship tethered to infancy. I am anxiously and terribly conscious of the brevity of infancy because a disease called hyperemesis gravidarum emaciated and debilitated me during my only pregnancy. Two weeks before I started painting the works in “communion”, I elected to surgically sever my fallopian tubes. My womb will never carry another child.
I live in West Texas, near southeastern New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns. The caverns feel like the earth’s womb. They are populated by pink and brown stalactites which drip-feed slow-growing stalagmites, interspersed with pools of glowing turquoise water. Time inside the caverns feels achingly slow; the ancient feels eternal. The forms, colors, and timelessness within Carlsbad Caverns inform my rocklike interpretation of soft, finite bodies.
I work from photos I took with an outstretched arm in fleeting moments during countless hours breastfeeding. I zoom in and scale up the image to magnify the physical relationship between mother and child. I usually translate the composition on top of a cadmium red background; beginning with blood, as breastmilk does, and layer forms in hues that express the oxytocin-fueled pleasure and emotional intensity of early motherhood.
My son and I both have synesthesia, and once, when I asked him what breastmilk tastes like, he thoughtfully responded, “pink”.
Bio:
Mary Victoria Taylor is a multimedia artist based in West Texas. She earned a BA in English Literature from Baylor University, after which she studied at SCAD and completed a summer residency at the New York Academy of Art. She is inspired by the physical and emotional intensities of motherhood and the geography of the American Southwest. She uses acrylic paint, soft pastels, and sand medium on canvas in her current work to meditate on maternity, memory, and mortality.