ARTIST STATEMENT
Milk Hole/Milk Stream is a video and photo series I began in 2021, born out of the urgent, surreal, and isolating experience of parenting under the constant threat of domestic violence. The work is both document and invocation — a visual articulation of the heightened vigilance and unrelenting fear that shaped my relationship to care, protection, and survival.
In moments of despair, I imagined an impossible act: delivering my breast milk directly into the soil or waterways, as if it could travel through the land and find its way to my children — to nourish, rescue, and reclaim them. This imagined ritual became a symbol of maternal desperation and power, fusing the visceral with the mythical.
Milk Hole/Milk Stream seeks to embody that emotional landscape — the vulnerability and resilience of a mother trying to transmit safety and love across distances and dangers. The series engages with themes of loss, magical thinking, and the embodied memory of trauma, offering a quiet yet potent resistance against erasure and silencing.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ingrid Butterer is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her practice is focused on the intersection of motherhood and violence represented through clay, fiber sculpture, earth art and photo/video/performance. Ingrid earned her BFA from the University of Michigan and her ED.M from Columbia University, Teachers College where she is a frequent lecturer. Her work has been published in Orenda Arts Journal, Quarentine Magazine and Womxn Artist Project. Ingrid’s work has shown at Lincoln Center, Atlantic Gallery, A.I.R. Gallery, Woman Made Gallery, Yamashita Gallery and Kyoto Shibori Museum in Japan, among others. She has been a featured speaker at The Women of Kansai Association (Japan), SLA Gallery, Gallery at St. Francis College, Brooklyn College and Yardmeter Editions in New York City. Ingrid’s recent endeavors include curating CONSTELLATION: SLA Art Space’s Women’s Invitational in New York City. Her work can be found in private collections throughout the U.S. and Japan.
© Ingrid Butterer