Water Mother
(3-channel installation)

2018
Open Signal, Portland, OR

Immersive film installation

Water Mother is a 28-minute, 3-channel immersive movement film installation that explores the continuum of motherhood as both generative and annihilative, and the facets of honoring grief while holding capacity for life, belonging within the anthropocene and reciprocating the care held by the water.

Hyper-processed, analog-glitched, dreamlike footage envelops the viewer in perspectives of three women at different stages of matrescence: anticipating, immersed in, and reflecting back on the threshold of becoming a mother. The result is an environment that can embrace or unsettle, depending on the viewer’s own relationship to presence larger than the self.

The work premiered in June 2018 at Open Signal in Portland as part of my participation in the inaugural Future Forum cohort. Projections surrounded the audience on three walls, with red cloth enclosing the space. A small table, also draped in red, offered headphones whose spiral cord resembled an umbilical cord. Red tape led viewers to a central circle, 10 cm in diameter — the dilation of the cervix in labor — where they stood encircled by image and sound. Each video channel and the audio track were looped at different lengths, ensuring the installation never repeated in the same way.

Featuring performers Jaleesa Johnston (left), Fernanda D’Agostino (right), and myself (center), the work drew from footage recorded with our In/Body collective along the Oregon coast. Sound layers included interviews with Johnston and D’Agostino, alongside my child-in-utero’s heartbeat and early childhood voice. Together, the shifting images and sound create a visceral meditation on motherhood as rupture, continuity, and elemental force.

Tags: Installation, Multi-channel film installation, Film, Sound / Composition, Embodied research, Ritual / Ceremonial practice, Collaboration, Interdisciplinary research, Somatic ecology, Maternal studies, Glitch