I became a parent at the same time that I lost my mother, left my old career, and moved to a new country. My early experiences of motherhood were entangled with my sense that I had lost ground, that I was unable to claim or sometimes even remember my own identity. The art studio was a space in which I intended to regain control. But that approach sometimes left me stagnating, and it was when I allowed my children and their chaos to intervene in my work that I found fresh ways to bring cohesion to the narratives I had been struggling to render as art.

One afternoon, my younger son started crying at the lunch table because he’d gotten a splotch of oil from his grilled cheese onto a picture he was coloring. “Look,” I said. “If we put it up to a window, the oil glows.” Wait a minute, I thought: it glows. I began using the technique in my own practice, creating ephemeral images out of bits of mixed media drawings on inexpensive papers, painting the collages with cooking oil, and photographing them backlit against the kitchen window. In other cases, I began letting the kids draw on my work surfaces. I’ve gone on to use child-inspired markmaking and oil translucency as the basis for illustrations and figurative paintings, but this work represents the initial stages of intervention, discovery, and embrace of the uncertain.