Mother and Child Reunite
Mother and Child Reunite
Embedded Files
These two pieces were sculpted to represent the physical and physiological processes of grief and the loss of one’s self, drawn directly from my personal story. As an individual who was adopted during the One-Child Policy, every moment from my birth was a fight for survival searching for a desperate grasp of air while a nation demanded adherence to a rigid social order in which babies were removed from their families or, at worst, never given a chance to live.
While reckoning with my own origins and searching for where I belong in this world, I also look toward the women whose babies were taken from them. I connect deeply with the experiences of childbirth and the profound postpartum grief that follows the loss of a child who once lived within your body. It is as if two souls were once one, and these two sculptures are meant to capture that shared spirit, severed yet still intertwined.
The sculpture on the left depicts the mother, burdened by the heaviness and hollowness that follows birth and loss. A symbolic cavern carved into her abdomen physically expresses the emptiness within her psyche. Beneath her feet, the impressions of a baby’s hands echoing the child’s need for attention, autonomy, and existence. Her open palm represents her vulnerability and her willingness to share this deeply personal part of herself, showing that she can still love the being who once lived within her, even with the emptiness that remains.
The sculpture on the right shows a younger woman, her body resting on jagged forms modeled after a hip bone shattered through surgical removal. This symbolizes my own experience of losing my hip after a car accident. Like the mother, she carries a hollow space, an absence at her hip where bone once resided. She sits upon the remnants of what once supported her. She looks down in pain and anguish of her loss waiting and not knowing if the sensation will fade.
Through the mother who gazes across patiently waiting, the young woman is meant to look up and meet eyes. It is through the openness of the mother and courage of the younger women that a connection can be made. From that connection both can learn that pain and grief are able to be endured, even when they feel imprisoning.
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