Love & Sacrifice Painting

This is about being torn in so many ways as a woman. About juggling time for yourself and others, about how when we love fully it can come at a sacrifice to ourselves, and about how we sacrifice so many things because the world is not designed for women to be able to do it all. It’s that if we succeed it comes at a cost, and that cost is often to ourselves. The subject is a close friend who is a midwife, a mother to two young boys, and the daughter of a mother living with Alzheimers. When taking the photograph that informed this piece I asked how she was feeling and she just replied: “exhausted”. This piece is about how constrained her life is, how she has no time for herself to just be; caught on the treadmill of life and itching to break free. The painting aims to poke fun at the hilarity of it all. That we rarely have it all, and when we think we’re overcoming a hurdle the universe has a way of throwing something else at us. This is a discussion piece, intended to dominate, intrigue and unsettle.