There was a moment, sometime after becoming a mother, when I realised the world had kept moving while I stood still.
My partner, my childless friends—they strode ahead, careers unfolding, conversations flowing, as if time had never paused.
But for me, time had done something different. It had collapsed inward, folding neatly into the shape of my home. The walls, the kitchen, the hum of the washing machine—they weren’t just surroundings; they were swallowing me whole.
Motherhood, I discovered, is a magic trick no one warns you about.
One day you are a person with ambitions, creative fire, and agency. The next, you are vanishing—bit by bit—into grocery lists, sleep schedules, and the rhythmic choreography of domestic life. The transformation is subtle but relentless.
One minute, you are staring into the fridge, contemplating dinner; the next, you are halfway inside it, wondering where you end and the house begins.
Swallowed Whole is a surreal meditation on that moment of realisation—the push and pull
between selfhood and sacrifice, the absurdity and beauty of domestic entrapment.
These images are not just about the weight of gender roles; they are about the quiet absurdity of finding yourself more
intimately connected to household appliances than to the outside world. If the home is a mouth, then
these photographs ask: how do you avoid being digested?
But there’s humour in the struggle, too. Because even in the most suffocating moments, there is a
kind of defiance in laughing at the absurdity of it all. And perhaps, in that laughter, there is also an
escape.
