Both/and: Artist-parents in conversation + a performance

Stills from Beside(s) Myself, a piece led by Clare Yow’s son's first times discovering a balloon.

• A “Foreword” by Jackie Wong

• The Practice of Permanence by Meghna Haldar

• Beside(s) Myself by Clare Yow

• Artist-parents respond to questions from Jackie Wong

• Artist and Organizer Biographies

On Boxing Day 2017, our baby was 16 days old. Our friends texted us late that afternoon. They had the night free without their kids, they were getting takeout, and could they bring us some for dinner? That they voluntarily made the trek across town on one of their few quiet nights to themselves in the thick of the holiday season continues to amaze me. They arrived at our apartment with beers, a book for our baby, and pad thai, fried rice, and curries. We sat on the couch and ate and talked. “When you have a baby, you’re really living,” they said. “The highs are super high. The lows are LOW. It gets easier, I swear!”

I could have fallen through the floor with gratitude. I was exhausted from labour and from the endless nights awake with a newborn who refused to sleep anywhere outside our arms. But I was even more tired from the emotional labour of shouldering the social pressure to be ecstatic about this new life change while living through the simultaneous misery and miraculousness of early days with a newborn. It was so affirming to be in the company of friends who loved us, held our child with dearness, and allowed us to simply be. This kind of community care, the kind that makes space for messiness and that allows us to hold each other close, is special because it is also rare. 

Despite a seeming abundance of ways to connect with each other in the age we’re in, it can be hard to find spaces that affirm our experiences living and thinking through multiple, dissonant realities. It’s possible and realistic to be grateful and angry, to be broad-minded and petty, to be in love and touched out. I worry that the pace of our world and the norms with which we communicate are jamming us into unnecessary binaries. I see this particularly in how we talk about—and, notably, don’t talk about—the lives of those who are tending to new lives. We live in a culture whose structures and systems render care work and parenting both invisible and stupid. By virtue of having been cared for or parented at some point in our lives, the thinking goes that we know how all that goes already, or someone’s taking care of it, so therefore it’s unimportant and trivial to the rest of us. Through this lens, care work is diminished and devalued. The struggles caregivers face in a neoliberal society are internalized as personal shortcomings rather than examined collectively as structural issues whose solutions require all of us to act differently.

I think there is so much potential and joy in reimagining how we enact care towards each other, whether they are a kitten, an elder, or a new young member of the family. It’s a failure of the imagination and the capitalist, supremacist, and patriarchal structures in which we’re living that represents care work and parenting so narrowly. By continuing to uphold and centre cis, white, straight, blood-related, upper-middle-class versions of parenthood, we’re missing out. We’re missing the voices and experiences of racialized, queer, non-binary, lower-income people engaged in care work, but who aren’t visible in mainstream representations of parenting.

Clare Yow’s Both/And steps in where so many have stopped short. Here is an art piece and a community discussion that centres parents living at the intersections of experience that are rarely seen in mainstream culture, but which are the reality of how many of us live. Clare’s work, to me, is an example of community care that we will all benefit from seeing more of. It’s the kind conversation that starts on the couches of apartment living rooms over takeout among friends taking care of each other. It’s the one we all need to hear.

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i waited forever to become a parent, not sure it was allowed

  and while in the middle of forever, a dear friend said that i had to choose between being a parent and making my film. the implication was that I couldn’t do it all, it was simply too much to ask from life. it is astonishing how similar the gestational cycle for film projects and children can be: hopeful and hellish. i was naïve and still in the hopeful stage of the cycle so my response was a noncommittal, “we’ll see”. 

but the seed once planted grew into a worm: was becoming a parent irreconcilable with a full artistic life – for a woman?

which do I give up?

as it happened, the child came while the film continued to gestate. still it began to feel like my friend’s prophecy would come true after all. our son was older and had significant needs related to development and attachment. he needed continuity of care to be able to attach. his pediatrician prescribed him “a boring life” as the best remedy for his ills. i knew i was going to have to settle for less, but a boring life?

a boring life 

sounded close to a death warrant to me. i returned to teaching once a week but my steady gig became parenting a 4 year old child who didn’t trust adults. we were total strangers forced into intimacy.  still it was a special love. we both made a choice to – kinda, sorta - love each other, if not always trust one another. i had to fake the parent thing because there was so much i didn’t know about my child – his thoughts, his memories, his needs. privately i grieved for many things, including what had once seemed like a promising career. as i watched my peers’ careers soar, i felt my artistic identity dissolve into a salt water mush of crisis parenting and Netflix.

things got worse

because his birth parent died and we were off on the roller coaster of grief and loss again. i had still been hanging on to the slender thread that connected me to a career of sorts. the feature film was still on the anvil. we were at a grief camp when I received a call from my producer. the financiers had changed their mind. again. 

it would not happen. again. 

in my mind, the different kinds of grief seemed to fuse into a waterfall, a powerful current of liquid energy and a sense of falling from a great height, backwards so i could still see blue skies, mountain tops and birds gliding overhead. i expected to crash on the rocks below but that didn’t happen either. i remained suspended, waiting to hit rock bottom. 

grief can be like that
like a sentence without beginning or end 

there is that famous song that i will not name. the one about cracks and lights and everything. usually people lie about that sort of thing all the time, but it’s true. even as my life felt crack’d, strangely I was feeling lighter. as my life became simpler, the view became clearer. 

a heart broken child is the saddest thing in the world

and the greatest teacher of life lessons. watching his grief, i understood mine. learning to love him meant learning to love myself first. watching him take risks made me understand courage. if he could start again and again, why couldn’t i? 

practice makes permanent, we tell him

and so i began writing again dreading the fact that i would have to occasionally leave home to develop these projects. becoming a parent had changed my work. now I understood life’s subtext better than ever before. my life’s work is precisely the opposite of what the doctor ordered for my kid. 

(which do I give up?)

a teaspoon of sugar 

and that was Powell River for a short work trip. he hated it as i increased the duration – and the bribes - a bit at a time. i have left him for 2 weeks, then for 3 weeks. i talk to him about my work, my world. i want him to know how much i love what i do even if it makes no sense to anybody else. 

when i leave, i always return. 

maybe if we do it long enough, we’ll get good at it. the loving, the working, the comings and goings. apart together.

practice will make permanent (X5)

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First-time parenthood these past nine months has been an extraordinary see-saw between corrosion and renewal. A second wind arrives at 5:30, a third before midnight, and sometimes, there is just none to be had and you wake from a nap after the sunset. During the day, the baby hands me slivers of time to reply to an email, jot something in a notebook, make a change for the occasional client, edit a few photos. But the 15, 30, 60 minute windows dissipate readily and I return to him… to eager, fluttering hands, glycerin-like tears, a sharp and curious sense of hearing, and a concise internal clock. He is becoming more independent now—a godsend—but I am still very much beholden to him, as I will be for years to come. I knew I was entering into some semblance of this, but acceptance of the intimate ways in which we are bound to one another is a constant surge and slump.

Navigating these contradictory feelings is tied to the ways I hold myself to harsh Western capitalistic ideals around productivity and performance, desire, and self-improvement. They are sorely embedded in my behaviour and the expectations I make of myself and sometimes others—the baby, even!—emerging in moments on edge:

the resentment and dread of being repeatedly interrupted while working after everyone else is asleep;

desperate middle-of-the-night Google searches about sleep training and weaning in order to reclaim some spaciousness for myself;

yearning to sustain my professional identity, while finding it near impossible to accomplish care and career work jointly;

self-applied pressures to tackle domestic duties when I am already so worn down, a trait no doubt inherited from my tireless mum.

The ways I bring institutionalized practices of labour into my parenting stem from seeing them modelled and internalized since a young age. They have been replicated in my artistic and freelance work similarly. Self-employment over the past few years has required buy-in that non-quantifiable, unwaged labour—like reading, researching, attending talks and workshops—is in fact valuable. Being glacially slow and perhaps overly meticulous is how I create, with rejection and failure certainly a part of that story too. 

It has been an uphill battle to be okay with this way of functioning while also trying to reshape that approach; one that lies in contrast to a market mentality that centers hyper-individualism, and rewards relentless momentum and excess in work.

So much of this type of labour is complicated by my own proximity to whiteness and Westernness. As a racialized woman, it arises in how I uphold structures bolstering the model minority myth, one that demands absurd standards of achievement at every turn. Now with a child, the recurring pull towards a construct like sleep training—just to have more freedom to “earn a living” and to avoid being singularly defined as someone’s mother—feels baffling and awful. Bedsharing has been the ideal arrangement for our family, so why do I keep desiring to conform to dominant Western attitudes? Why do I keep trying to push him away?

_____

My would-be live performance at the Future Forum morphed as we became more housebound due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With usual and unusual stressors extra amplified in our studio apartment, rethinking the work felt natural and necessary. Thus, Beside(s) Myself became a piece led by my son's first times discovering a balloon.

Watch Beside(s) Myself

In the photographs and video, I mimicked his play, with no real end goal in mind. It is a simple idea but a novel one for me. It symbolizes a departure from my traditional workflow:

from calculated overthinking and design;

from always needing to have a concept and its development all figured out before truly beginning;

from formal art education that says every artistic decision needs to be thoroughly justified;

from the obligation to make something that can be packaged as a commodity (whether an exhibition, a sale, or grant money);

from the gravity of identity politics, the defining focus of my artworks.

This piece is silly and light-hearted, a welcome distraction from the unrest and upheaval of this health and economic crisis. Strange and a stretch as it may seem, letting a baby lead an art piece is an act of resistance—one that finds worth in pleasure and process.

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HG: Hiromi Goto MH: Meghna Haldar DT: Damla Tamer SJ: Sandeep Johal

(Note to readers about Hiromi Goto’s responses: “Please know that I use what's considered ‘sentence fragments’ quite liberally because it's an actual proper sentence structure in Japanese and I just transliterate my relationship with this language into the written form of English. I.e. it's not an affectation and it's purposeful.”)

What’s missing from conversations in the communities you travel in about parenting and work?

HG: I'm arriving at this question as a middle-aged cis queer woman, a writer whose children are now adults, and my own mother a senior. So the conversations I'm having about parenting are not about hands-on care of the children (in the ways I spoke about when they were very young, and needed my time, attention and care in very daily ways) but how best I can support them both emotionally and financially on a writer's income which is very modest. As my mother ages I know that she will require greater care and support, just as my grandmother did near the end of her life. So I am moving from one kind of care work towards another. I worry about what my financial situation will be like when I reach my senior years. I do not expect my children to care for me. But I wonder how I will care for myself. When does an artist "retire"? My concerns right now centre around being able to offer some financial cushion for my adult children while they are trying to gain their own financial stability as well as looking forward to the near future when my mother will require more physical care supports-- so the child, me, will be supporting my parent. This is also a kind of parenting…. I am also blessed with a partner, my sisters, and an ex-husband who are supportive of my children. I am not alone with my parenting concerns. For this I am truly grateful.

DT: I am lucky to be part of communities in which I can openly discuss my opinions, but issues of immigration often fall within blind spots when the majority of the members are born Canadian citizens, including BIPOC folks. Canada has an economy that greatly benefits from immigrant labour and yet complicated, ever-changing, and inconsistent permanent residency procedures which tend to privilege applicants from the so-called 1st world countries and those with financial capital. When the entirety of the parenting conversation revolves around benefits that are or only can be accessible by those with status, it tends to exclude non-permanent residents or undocumented folks categorically. Moreover, a newcomer’s lack of inherited social capital and the extra labour required to fit in -and at times, assimilate- makes their job as a parent challenging in different ways than their native counterparts. If the phenomena of the “modern woman” is partially propped up by the shift of the feminine responsibilities from the execution of labour to the administration of labour (by outsourcing childcare, for instance) then the Covid 19 crisis has shown how this shift can reverse itself almost spontaneously.¹ In the best of times, we rely on immigrant labour to make our jobs easier as parents. We cannot discuss labour issues without discussing parenting issues, and yet we cannot talk about parenting without talking about immigration issues.

SJ: Acknowledging that an artist is a parent. I became a mother and began my art career around the same time. All I’ve ever known as an artist is being a mother. For me they’re inseparable. For the most part, the arts community has been very welcoming to my son, but there are times when people aren’t exactly thrilled to see children at art-related events. Oftentimes, I bring my son with me because I want him to experience art and be in my world, but other times, I have no choice because there is no alternative. We no longer live in an extended family structure and childcare is expensive. It can feel very isolating and lonely when people embrace your art self but reject your parent self.

Can we talk about internalized capitalism and internalized misogyny? How has that showed up for you in your experiences as parents and artists? 

HG: Internalized capitalism comes out in the form of jealousy; a misdirected emotional response to seeing the "rewards/awards" other artists are endowed with that I might not receive. When there is a monetary element to these awards this jealousy is felt keenly. But this is just an unsustainable capitalist system that sees us "compete" for (some of us), ultimately, basic needs. The capitalist model which measures "successes" has also had me devalue my work in a range of ways, but, foremost, has been a pressing sense of having not published "enough". Capitalism has me feeling like I ought to be publishing a new book every 2-3 years. LOL. So if this is the capitalist measure stick I'm holding for myself I feel like I'm a failure…. Illogical and irrational. But how insidious is capitalism… A universal basic income would eliminate a lot of social ills in this country. 

Internalized misogyny…this is harder for me to parse. Misogyny frames male writers differently from female writers. Male writers are seldom asked about how parenting affects their art practice-- there is an assumption that their wives are doing this work. I was developing my writing life a year before I had my first child. He was born when I was just turning twenty four years old. I published  my first novel when he was near four years old. When I was pregnant with my second child I was lucky enough to attend a writer's retreat. My mother cared for my son while I was away. At this retreat I asked my mentor, SKY Lee, who was also a parent, but of an older child, how she negotiated between the needs and desires of the children versus the needs and desires of the writer. She told me that there's no rush to focus on the writing and that it will always be there. That the children are young and need you like this for only a while-- and that we will have time later in life for writing. It was a relief to hear this at that time. I was wrestling with the counter pulls between responsibility and artistic desire. I could not do both, simultaneously, I felt. I could only do one, fully. This is due to my own nature--this will not hold true for everyone. I don't regret that I set aside my writing development and projects until my children were both ready to enter early public education. It was eight years later that I published my second novel. In between the two novels I had my second child, my husband and I split up (yet remained living in the same house in order to co-parent), I came out and I fell in love with a woman. These are very personal moments but they are also part of the weft and weave of my writerly life. When my husband and I broke up as a couple I knew that I could not juggle being a single-mom and a writer with our limited resources split into two separate households. That if we lived apart I could not afford to continue writing-- everything would go into trying to stay financially afloat while being the best mother I could be. There would be no time or energy left over to write. Between the two of us, my ex-husband and I could share resources in one household and both of us continue our art practices. And, the children did not want us to live separately. So, we all lived together as a family, but not as a couple. It was not an easy time… But we got by. Is there internalized misogyny that affected my life and art trajectory? No doubt. Universal income and universal housing would have had a profound impact upon my life as a parent and writer. It's odd, but I can see the possibilities of the end of capitalism before the end of misogyny…

MH: I do plenty of free labour for people - writing, editing, conceptualizing - in ways they would not imagine asking another professional - like a dentist or an electrician or a plumber - to do. It ends up feeding my own perceptions about the value of my own work. Is my work worth somebody’s money? Does it have value? Would they ask a man, especially a white man to do the same work for free? With age and experience, comes confidence. Also with becoming a parent, I want to be paid for my labour, my time and my mind. I can’t lecture my lil brown kid about valuing himself and seeing himself as equal while not valuing myself... Modeling helps the model as much as the child :)

DT: I am interested in thinking about how internalized capitalism shapes our sense of time. The experiential economy influences what as artists we might perceive as work, or more precisely, as work fulfilled. As Hito Steyerl notes, “In addition to delivering works, artists, or more generally content-providers, nowadays have to perform countless additional services, which slowly seem to become more important than any other form of work. The Q&A is more important than the screening, the live lecture more important than the text, the encounter with the artist more important than the one with the work. ... [The artist needs to be] not only present, but exclusively present, present for the first time, or in some hyperventilating capacity of newness.”² The presence necessitated by this condition does not apply solely to appearances, it requires a constant production of presence for oneself. For a studio artist, being in the studio becomes more than just precious time but a capital that is traded in presence-units. In conversations with my fellow artist-mothers I have noticed how often we say to each other, “I feel awful that I couldn’t make it to the studio this last few days/weeks/months,” communicating guilt and in the process asking for a consolation that will legitimize our lack of presence in the studio, replacing with an equivalent “but you were spending so much time with x/y/z (your child)’’ rendering the whole thing an honest transaction. When presence itself becomes a commodity, the challenge then becomes finding ways to radically re-situate presence in a context other than productivity. Right around the time that my child turned three, I realized that I was trying to cross a subconscious threshold, the deadline to become the woman who can do-it-all. I had made a silent negotiation with myself when I was expecting my child, covertly deciding that until the baby was two I would be pretty much bound up by my responsibilities as a mother, and have little time or other capital to focus on work. Things would start to normalize soon after though, and I would emerge, a successful mother, educator artist - not just the same as before, but better, because of my ability to do-it-all. Needless to say, things didn’t go as smoothly as I imagined. I drew satisfaction from the eclectic mix of duties that I was able to accomplish in unreasonably short periods of time, and often felt powerful because of that. However, as the bizarre combinations of tasks accumulated, I found myself going back to this issue of the do-it-all, and asking “Why does my labour have to encompass everything?” and more recently, “What kind of social conditions does the all in the do-it-all signify and structure?” The all creates a vacuum around it; it leaves nothing, for no one.

SJ: Anything considered “women’s work” is not valued. Women are expected to do it all – have families, be Pinterest worthy mothers, and simultaneously balance that with a successful career. Women still tend to take on most of the caregiving, household organizing, and domestic work as well. And, we are expected to stay at home with our children, which affects career advancement, but if we go back to work, we are judged for leaving our children. I feel that pressure all the time.

We live in a world where there is a huge emphasis on production. The more you produce, the more money you make, the more value you have. Unfortunately, caregiving and domestic work, while undeniably necessary and important, is unpaid labour that continues to be undervalued. Because it’s women’s work.  

What are some areas of the mainstream conversation about parenting and work that you would like to see change?  

HG: Mainstream conversations around parenting and work often defaults into assumed middle-class and whiteness, heteronormativity. These baseline assumptions need to be blown out of the water. Family units and relationships in and around parenting and work are complex, fluid, diverse and multifaceted. Intergenerational households/communities also should be made more visible. Many people have been taught to consider talking about money/income to be "uncouth" or "impolite". This is a class issue. A lot of inequality around parenting and art practice is connected to wealth. We need to bring a class analysis to discourse around parenting and work. It shouldn't be the wealthy that can make art that hits the mainstream consciousness.

MH: The work of artists who are also parents is deeply undervalued in childcare support settings. For example, parents of a child with special needs who requires extra support during spring/summer camps will require proof of regular and full time employment which is sometimes difficult for artists to show. As if to say that my kid is less deserving of support because I am mostly self employed. I struggle to find time to do my work and apply for grants. We need to engage with the seemingly invisible labour of being artists and parents.

DT: I am not convinced that wellness can be a solid starting point from which we can take radical action for bettering labour conditions, unless it considers bodies (collective and anonymous) as well as the body (individual and specific). As discussed in several critiques, wellness is continually utilized as a signifier of care by employers, that corresponds, ultimately, to the employee’s state of well-being insofar as it relates to the continuation of production. There is a rapid rise of effort, attention, and creativity in this somewhat false economy of care (and it is an economy, with entire departments and their resources being dedicated to the surveillance and betterment of the wellness of employees). An institution which refuses to better the precarious labour conditions of its workers may not skimp on organizing lunch-time feel-good cupcake-making workshops.

If we are to pursue a serious link between the products of our labour and our bodily and mental well-being, satisfaction and happiness, then it is vital to do this within a framework of trust, rather than of accountability. The destruction of trust -an expectant, dependant, outward-oriented state of being- and its replacement by accountability -an individually possessed set of actions and predictable results, a closed loop- at an institutional level signifies a temporal and spatial shift in how we are instructed to perceive ourselves in the trajectory of life. I have tremendous belief in the power that we have, as artists and parents, to be able to rebuild our networks of trust; both the stability and growth of our labour depend on it.

SJ: The idea that parenting and art are mutually exclusive. While yes, it may be more difficult to be both an artist and a parent, it isn’t impossible.

Acknowledge that our children exist and the struggles artist-parents face. Give us space to talk about it. A simple, “how are you doing?” can go a long way. Just because you’re a parent, it doesn’t mean all of your work will suddenly be about parenthood. And if it is, so what?

Restructure timetables so artists can bring their families to art events. Provide childcare or activities for children.

Create more residencies for families.

Don’t make an artist-parent choose between their career and their family - create space and support for both.

What collective actions are possible in building more tangible supports for caregivers that honours the invisible, unpaid labour they undertake every day?

HG: I wonder if an intergenerational Care-Co-op for artists/writers could be set up? Even a bulletin board where people can ask questions and someone who's been through it already can offer advice? Kinda like a reddit, but w/o the trolls… I guess it would need to be moderated! I know that when I was going through the challenging days of caring for my first newborn I was filled with anxiety and uncertainty. I love my mum, but at that time I still had a lot of unprocessed baggage that I carried and we weren't as close as we are now. Sometimes her advice and experience was relayed in a way that I found hard to integrate. If I had had someone older but not connected to personal baggage to offer advice, then, I would have loved it…. Especially if they were a writer/artist. But maybe such sites are accessible now. :) There's so much more online than there was in the 1990s… XD (PS Earplugs can muffle the piercing cries of an inconsolable baby! You can still hear them. But it won't set your teeth on edge so much. <3) (These comments are not answering the question above, I know…)

DT: We can and should continue to make childcare a central issue for labour. Promoting childcare subsidies for artists at a governmental level, factoring in childcare fees while building institutions that use artist labour are all great steps, but ultimately we have to find ways to un-commodify childcare so that it is not just accessible, but integrated to life at large. There is no easy or immediate way to do this, and we can take as many routes as we wish to make this possible, even if these may seem conflicted. These may range from efforts focused on law-making to informal collectivization. When folks establish networks of trust with fellow artist-parents and take turns watching each others’ children, for instance, they also structure in the process the social and emotional conditions that make asking for help possible.

Footnotes

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Clare Yow

Clare Yow is a visual artist and creative freelancer specializing in design and marketing projects. Focusing on conceptual and documentary photography, her artworks memorialize everyday objects, bodies, and places as they intersect with race and culture, transnationality, and feminism. Her past year of new motherhood has been in exercise in self-compassion in caregiving and work. Born in Singapore, Clare lives, works, and parents on the unceded, ancestral, and occupied territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

Jackie Wong

Jackie Wong has a background in journalism and maintains a freelance practice as a facilitator, writer, and editor. She has reported on housing justice, drug policy, and equity issues. In the first year of her kid’s life, she was freelancing and things were chaotic. He’s now two, and she’s striving for a different kind of life-life balance.

Hiromi Goto

Hiromi Goto, an emigrant from Japan, gratefully resides on the Unceded Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil Waututh Territories. She’s the author of many books. Her first graphic novel, Shadow Life, with artist Ann Xu, is pending with First Second Books. Hiromi is currently being guided by land-based learning, and at work on a second graphic novel and bird poems.

Meghna Haldar

Meghna Haldar is a storyteller, educator and screen based artist based in Vancouver. Her films - drama, documentary, experimental - include Dirt, a feature documentary that won multiple awards, and has screened in museums, conferences and art galleries worldwide, and BOL (Speak!). She is presently developing a participatory fiction film “Beej” with the Indigenous Gond Tribe of Central India. Recently, Meghna was selected as a participant for the MSG Development Lab 2020-2021 by the Vancouver Asian Canadian Theater in association with the Playwrights Theater Center for her play “Termite,” and is an artistic collaborator with the Frank Theater for their Fall 2020 presentation of Diaspora. Having taught at institutions like ECUAD, University of Texas at Austin and Arts Umbrella, Meghna is a fierce advocate for trauma informed care in the child welfare system and schools in BC.

Sandeep Johal

Sandeep Johal is a Vancouver-based artist whose colourful geometric forms and intricate black and white line work is aesthetically and conceptually inspired by her South Asian heritage. Sandeep believes in the power of art to create awareness around issues related to cultural identity, gender equality, and human rights. Her art practice is an expression of her social and cultural concerns, particularly gender justice. Sandeep is currently preparing for her 10 week residency at Burrard Arts Foundation which begins in October.

Damla Tamer

Damla Tamer is a visual artist born in Istanbul, Turkey and currently practicing in Vancouver. Working across experimental mark-making, textiles and performance, Damla negotiates the relationships between aesthetics and politics, particularly the links between representation, intention, anticipation and agency. Her work is included in The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom, a recent group show at the Contemporary Art Gallery. Damla teaches as contract faculty at several academic institutions, and has a five year old child.

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