Isolation Pictures 1 | Colin Pantall

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Colin Pantall

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The traditional family album is filled with moments of love, of celebration, of ritual. Contemporary images of motherhood focus on the body, the flesh, the psychodrama, the intensity of emotion.

The mental load of motherhood looks at the moments of distance, of separation between a mother (Katherine) and her daughter (Isabel) in the early years of her life. It’s a separation that every mother goes through, that every infant goes through, a separation where the mother-child relationship is temporarily strained, where the shadows of the self the mother once was fleetingly returns, where the anguish of isolation, of being alone in the world is felt by the child.

The mental load of motherhood is a product of my sustainable domestic practice.

Since 2001 I have focused my work on my immediate environments. I have done this both from a pragmatic belief in photography what you know, what you have access to, what you love (the flip side being what you don’t know, don’t have access to, don’t love will always be unattainable and result in the presentation of a surface. Not that there is anything wrong with surfaces.

That pragmatism also connects to the shift in domestic circumstances that happened when our daughter was born. The photography I could make was, by economic and emotional necessity, close to home. Photography of my domestic environments became part of the maintenance of my creative self.

It also was an expression of my photographic privilege. As co-carer of our daughter, I used my camera as a means of extending myself beyond the often frustrating delights of my part of childcare, a part of childcare that was as often as possible removed from the everyday drudgery of the domestic environment. It was not an extension available to my wife who found herself both the primary emotional caregiver as well as the one who took up the bureaucratic, psychological, and emotional burden of childcare. If there was comfort to be given, she was the one who gave it. She was overwhelmingly the one who gave comfort, reassurance, and care. It was constant, unrelenting, and intensely physical. It was exhausting.

This series is a documentation both of that burden and of my essential privilege in being able to photograph it.

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