'SHE'S HERE FOR THEM'

'She’s Here For Them' is a tribute to my mother’s career as a nurse and a member of a breastfeeding support group that defined the essence of the words, community and transmission. I have spent hours on the phone with her, discovering more things about her life and career that I didn't know about. What she and the women she worked with have done, to me, is an act of resistance. Creating a safe space for women to give them the choice to breastfeed through information. She did that through the support group, Cherbourg Allaitement. Holding meetings at home to create a safe space for dialogue and help between young mothers, primarily about breastfeeding but also about anything else they needed to talk about. Later on, she worked with mothers that couldn’t be with their babies because they were born prematurely and had to be monitored in another department of the hospital: neonatology. She spent her career next to these mothers, listening to them, providing them with all the choices and giving them love and help within an institution where women patients are not listened to, especially women of colour.

This series contains portraits of my mother, her mother and some of the women she helped through the years with their kids, along with images of the regional landscapes and textiles pieces made of linen, print and merino wool embroidery. The linen was my grandmother's wedding sheets, a traditional gift in a farmer's family in Normandie.

I had the immense pleasure of meeting mothers and hearing their experiences of breastfeeding, the constant judgement and the happiness of finding the proper help.


Through this series, I wish to show an act of resistance that we need more than ever in this capitalist society - community. We need each other, safe spaces and access to the right information about our bodies. More than ever we need to be able to make a conscious choice about our healthcare.