Hi 👋 I’ve been nominated for 21st edition of @premiocairo , the show is at @palazzorealemilano I grew up seeing many representations of women breast feeding and pregnant (very common iconography in Italy) but not until very recently (thanks to Miriam Cahn and Dana Schutz for example) did I see paintings by women representing the act of giving birth. I asked my friends who have experienced childbirth to describe it to me : they talked about pain so intense it was like fire, about feeling like they were becoming an animal again , about channeling something profoundly primal, and being almost in a state of trance. I looked at images and drawings of labour positions, which are not, art-historically speaking, positions that we see the female body typically painted in. There is a lot of squatting and screaming. Last image is a funny image I found on Pinterest of someone who juxtaposed the rapper Lil’ Kim’s album titles onto labour positions. I was drawn to the squatting position in the upper right hand corner so I posed and combined myself and my sister’s features to create this fierce snake-icon-creature. #premiocairo