Other Mothers explores non-biological maternality, the mothering of a child who is not the mother’s own, whether through birth or adoption.
The project’s epicentre is shared and divergent memories, told visually through photography, with text and audio.
I look at the cast of the book and see a cast of beautiful, but broken, figures, (inability to conceive, less than perfect mothering, bi-polar disorder, eating disorder) brought together along a continuum of care for an equally damaged child.
In making this work I am enormously grateful to Colin Pantall, Laura Hynd and Cemre Yesil for acting as sounding boards throughout its development and for all their wit, wisdom and encouragement during the past two years. And of course for the work of evolutionary anthropologists such as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, whose insights into alloparenting and communal child rearing underpinned this work.
On the back of this work, Laurence Cawley was named by Source Magazine as one of the UK and Ireland's emerging photographic talents in September 2022.
