Expansion of the Universe

The project begins with the bodily experience of motherhood: the transformation of one body into more than one, and the expansion of its boundaries, physical and otherwise.

Here lies the parallel with the expanding universe: space and volume increase; something comes into existence that did not exist before. Turning to popular explanations of the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe, I discovered that physicists often resort to comparisons drawn from cooking—a realm traditionally coded as feminine. In the project, the culinary and the cosmic shift in scale and merge.

A newborn does not yet distinguish its body from its mother’s; separation is a skill acquired later. Soon, however, its rapid movement away from the mother begins, not unlike the accelerating motion with which galaxies recede from one another. The extraordinary transformation of a singularity into multiplicity, into an immense world destined to expand and exist for billions of years—is there a more compelling metaphor for motherhood? Was it not from the tiny, maternal body of the Venus of Willendorf that the world as we know it emerged?