Birth is a threshold. Giving birth, the body becomes a portal, inviting life from one side of the veil into the other. Baby moves from darkness of womb like a seed in soil into the light of this world. We become the doorway for spirit. There is a special energy that emerges when we stand between two worlds. It is an energy that we share with sprouting plants, with hatching eggs, with algae blooms and flower buds, with animal mamas everywhere. 

We can prepare. We can dream. We can plan. And yet when the birth field opens around us, we can only surrender to the process. Sometimes it exactly as we imagined, and sometimes it is very very different. Whether a surgical birth or a vaginal one, a natural birth or a medically assisted one; we cannot control the energy of birth. We can harness ourselves to it, we can be the vessel for it, we can fight it, we can ride it, but we cannot control it. The body opens and baby crosses the threshold. It is a sacred thing this opening, a thing of blood and bone and flesh and pain and breath and sometimes excrement too, that brings a sweet new unfolding into the world.

 The series of small tapestries that make up the Birth Stories collection combines the voices of nearly a dozen women from North America and Europe to speak to the deeply intimate yet universal experience of birth.  I am honored and humbled that so many individuals shared their handwritten experiences. These tapestries are woven using an expanding color and textural palette of hand dyed and handspun yarns combined with the intimacy of handwritten lived experience.  This is an ongoing series, that I expect will number in the hundreds before it finds itself complete.  The iterative nature of this series speaks to the universal archetype of birth while the scale and accessibility speaks to its deeply personal nature.

My intention with these is to offer a smaller scale original artwork that is priced with affordability and accessibility in mind.  With this in mind, each of the Birth Stories series of small scale tapestries will be priced at $40 to reflect 40 weeks gestation.

One of these tapestries makes the perfect gift for the new parent, grandparent, midwife, doula, lactation consultant, OB, prenatal yoga teacher, or OB nurse in your life.

The mixed media tapestries are mounted on 8”x8” stretched artist’s canvas, making them perfect to prop on a shelf or easy to hang on a wall.