Motherhood is incomparable to anything else. It’s a complete expansion. I liken it to an entirely new life. The way I see is different. The way I feel is different. I’m a completely different person.

In Passing is a long-term exploration of my familiar space that marks the departure and slow return to self that I experienced in becoming a mother. I’m interested in the intimacy harboured within the microcosm of a young family. I lost my mum just months after my first son Ari was born, and I found myself navigating birth, death and the intense combination of grief and joy that comes from deep love and connection.

The project began in quite a subconscious way. It was therapeutic for me to make work and keep up a part of myself that was separate from my identity as a daughter of a dying mother or a mother of a new baby. Before I had kids, I could comprehend the challenge of birth, but not the physiological and emotional changes that come with motherhood. In many ways, I think it’s an experience you can’t prepare for. I became interested in moments of static domesticity. These unspectacular and mysterious encounters that sat alongside these major life events.

Each image charts a particular stage in our family life and offers a reflection of the ever-shifting emotional landscapes. It’s still quite hard for me to comprehend the early experience I had with my first son. When he was four months old, we moved from Sydney back to my hometown in Bundjalung Country. We found out my partner’s dad had terminal cancer and that my mom had cancer. It was a time of massive upheaval. I spent a lot of time wishing I could separate things, but life is messy, and in that chaos, I’ve come to realise that things you could never dream of happening, do happen. In a lot of ways, I’m grateful for experiencing life and death so close together. It’s made me appreciate the in-between – the joy of being alive.