Eleanor Oakes mounts 'love's labor' exhibition in Detroit, MI

Eleanor Oakes '07 recently mounted "love’s labor" a collaborative exhibition that partners with forty mothers in the Metro Detroit Area to create a contemporary portrait of early motherhood that reflects on nourishment, bodily memory as transferred through ancestry, and society’s reliance on the unsupported labor of parenting. The exhibition was on view at the Valade Family Gallery in Detroit, MI, from April 5-27, 2024, and was made possible thanks to the generous support of Culture Source, the Andy Warhol Foundation, College for Creative Studies, and Arts and Scraps.

The images were made using each mother’s breastmilk as a light-sensitizing agent in the historic salted paper process. Salt printing was one of the first photographic processes ever invented, presented by Henry Fox Talbot in 1839. But historically, very few women were documented to have worked in the process and few images depicting motherhood were ever made. Using breastmilk, or formula, in this process adds bodily and maternal labor to the prints, while also injecting a uniquely feminist narrative into the history of photography. Images of family and community gardens were presented alongside the portraits 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. Collectively, this work emphasizes the importance of care as a fundamental building block to connection, and the gallery becomes a space where we can reflect and connect in honor of that care.

Link to website: http://www.eleanoroakes.com