Carli Adby’s work focusses on relationships, expectation, female identity, and the multi-faceted concept of woman as mother as the understanding of ourselves within this. She is currently studying an MA in Photojournalism and documentary at Westminster and works as a freelance commercial photographer, championing female owned businesses and founders. This ongoing series, is a work in progress, that involves photographing her mother & sometimes them together, looking at this cyclical nature of identity, of one becoming another.
Photography has always allowed me to tap into my emotions or experiences and express the related feelings, attempting to tell a story with honesty and compassion.
Working from our internet expression of the female as body I would like to draw on my personal experiences of feeling lost as a decision maker, as a woman & how the self-constructed impression of oneself, our individuality, can be formed from our childhood & the relationships & experience we have with our mothers.
Becoming a mother for me is filled with fear, loss, control and a narrative that places obligation on the woman to carry the burden of the decision making and, subsequently the possible erasure of her existing identity.
But how is this ‘Mother’ identity linked with that of the daughters, how much of the mother appears in the daughter and daughter in mother? Where does the individual begin and where does it end? Is individuality really ever something fully claimed?
Using gestures from my childhood I introduce a sense of play, or comparison, of critique through our bodies, challenging the narrative of identity through the flesh that has for so long been a source of power and pain for women.
