Baby Brain - Exploring more authentic images of motherhood

Baby Brain is a collection of portraits made with mothers, mostly through pregnancy but reaching beyond birth too, an ongoing art practice and conversation about how the images we consume and create shape the way we feel about our experiences of becoming a parent.

The work has grown out of vulnerable conversations with the mothers I've photographed, exploring the gap between their real experience and the version of motherhood they'd absorbed through the images around them. I've brought in somatic coaching approaches within the sessions themselves, helping each woman feel present in her body and able to express herself honestly rather than performing for the camera. The majority of women are practitioners too, including a movement artist, yoga teacher and a musician, very much collaborating in the image making process. This is something I would like to share with women within my local community.

The portraits that come out of this are both a record of that process and pieces of work in their own right, ones that push back against the polished, conventional pictures of motherhood we're used to seeing.

It's picking up momentum: Shelley's portrait was featured in the RBSA Photography Exhibition in 2025, and Laura continues to develop the therapeutic side of the work, bringing photography and somatic practice closer together.

At its heart, Baby Brain is a counter-narrative to the image-consuming, social-media-led, AI-generated visual culture we're swimming in: real bodies, real emotions, real stories.

A project of a personal and private nature some images have not been shared anywhere public.