Because a mother never stops bleeding
Carolina Echeverri
“Every person in this world has been birthed by a woman. All 8 billion of us have, universally and undeniably, come out of a woman’s body. Yet a miserable 4% of all the research and development funds used in the healthcare sector worldwide go to women’s health.”
About the artist’ work:
The luscious, abstract figures creating a background to Carolina’s maternal view are cientific brain images created based on projections of real Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), brain slices, and histology imagery from different human, mostly female, brains, including her own and credited to the Allen Institute and Dr Jodi Pawluski. They range in age from 30-50 years and include Latino-American, African American, and Caucasian ethnicities.
In “Because a mother never stops bleeding,” Colombian artist based in Copenhagen Carolina Echeverri presents a collection of images in which maternal life and its everyday shortcomings meet the beauty of biology. The project is her catharsis, “a physical manifestation of my heartbreaking rebellion against the lack of awareness, of empathy, and of research in female health.”
“This is about me. A woman. Passing through life, destabilized by motherhood. A material and psychological state that I’m still not sure that I am surviving. Moving in a straight line with nowhere to go. A volatile subject after birthing, pressed by its novel and amplified intensities. Expropriated by my own life and understanding. Removed from my identity because, to society, a mother doesn’t exist without her child. An object in a continuously threatening universe. Forced into not belonging to myself or to the world I knew. Imprisoned by my own life lived, struggling to resist a reality I can’t control,” states the artist.
The series is a diary that weaves together a truth generationally lived by billions, yet still only understood by few, with the threads of intimate photography, mother’s testimonies, women’s brains, and neuroscience. A collection of science filtered through profound personal interpretation. “I’m searching for healing, for mending, for purity, for contemplation. Clarity. The mental states, the triggers, the discursive capacities, the over-intoxicated senses, the urgency, the desire,” says Carolina.
“Flirting with the existence of the greatest unconditional love recorded, I’m trying to show you things I can’t understand. I’m drawing and coloring states and feelings with the erroneous colors of impure analog photography. Undisturbed, collaging motherhood with science. No myths, no expectations of glory.”
I’m reaching for the reinvention or re-envision of becoming a mother. We mutate. We evolve. Mothers see the unpredictable that is supposed to be predictable. Cruel optimism that is beyond the range of normal people. Call it biological coping, or an interplay of enlightenment. Euphoric naivety. Let’s also call it progression, recognition, justice, and love.”
