ARTIST STATEMENT
As a photographic artist my studio practice reconsiders a feminist view of art history to address urgent issues of care, specifically around mothering and climate change. “love’s labor” is an ongoing project that utilizes breastmilk as a salting solution in the historic salted paper process to make prints that reflect on nourishment, bodily memory as transferred through ancestry, and society’s reliance on the unsupported labor of parenting. Breastmilk adds bodily labor to the print, while also injecting a uniquely feminist narrative into the history of photography. Each print is unique as tonal shifts and fat splatters swirl like small galaxies. These differences remind us that our bodies are not machines, but imperfect organisms. They encourage acceptance and understanding while countering the harmful perfectionist rhetoric engrained in the photographic medium. Images of family and community gardens are additionally included to honor the mothers’ own practices of care, as well as to reference continued nourishment through the land and the tension between the presumptive ‘natural’ experience of parenting in simultaneous conjunction and conflict with the environment. Our modern society overlooks care as something frivolous and sequestered, but this work exposes care as a necessary building block, the key to meaningful connection to each other and our environment.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Eleanor Oakes is a photographic artist based in Detroit, MI. She has exhibited her work internationally, including solo exhibitions at Belle Isle Viewing Room (Detroit), and Tyler Wood Gallery (New York and San Francisco), and recent group exhibitions at the Houston Center for Photography (Houston), Filter Space (Chicago), Silver Eye Center for Photography (Pittsburgh), and Wasserman Projects (Detroit). She is the recipient of a Flourish Fund grant from Culture Source and the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Center Annual Award from the Houston Center for Photography, a Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award from the San Francisco Foundation, and an Applebaum Emerging Artist Residency, among others. Oakes earned her MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University and a BA in Art and Art History from Princeton University. She is Associate Professor and Section Lead of Photography at the College for Creative Studies and was the Founder of Darkroom Detroit, a 501(c)3 nonprofit with the mission of making photography more accessible in Detroit.
© Eleanor Oakes