Dilyana Tankova
Unveil, 2023
Getting to Know Myself began with getting to know my mother and daughters. I see myself in the prism of my mother’s influence and my influence on my own daughters. I am pivotal, central to the equation, mirroring my mother and reflecting to my daughters.
The family group is representative of the stages of womanhood: the ancient mythical division of the stages in a woman’s life which are seen as maiden, mother and crone.
My mother is at the Crone Stage of life heralded by the menopause where it is a time to sit back, enjoy and collect the fruits of hard working womanhood, and to share the gathered wisdom of a life of experience. However she often tells me that growing old makes you feel invisible, isolated and unwanted, These powerful words are indicative of the modern world’s disconnect to the ancient mythologies and of our contemporary life’s obsession with youth and beauty for its own sake and the undervaluing of every stage of life womanhood has to offer. Despite popular cultural views women in their 50s carry the weight of society on their crone's shoulders: caring for older generations above them and younger ones below helping raise their grandchildren and care for their elderly parents. Society would not function well without the crones.
Spiritually, the Mother Stage is a time of powerful change. Giving birth teaches the deeper meaning of surrender, from self to selfless through the experience of overpowering body processes and the responsibility of motherhood. The mother carries all the responsibility for life after conception alone through gestation and birth and the first months of life giving nourishment. Personally my journey into motherhood was arduous involving multiple loss and I felt isolated and invisible and by muting emotions and experiences that I carried inside. Giving birth to my youngest daughter Louiza was the cure for our souls after multiple miscarriages.This portrait is a celebration of life but also a symbol of a bereavement.
My elder daughter Izabella represents the Maiden Stage of life, discovering individual creative potential. This can be a wonderful time to learn at all levels: building skills, experiencing the complexities of relationships of all kinds, preparing for adult responsibilities, to explore their potential including their sexuality, and to enjoy the freedom to learn and gain knowledge. My daughter is turning into a beautiful young woman as I observe how the burdens of womanhood are naturally taking over and she is changing like a white canvas being painted by nature in the beautiful colours of womanhood. This portrait celebrates this stage of her life.
These portraits are inspired by pre Raphaelite painters' textiles and textures used in their paintings, victorian portraits of children and the book of Laura Larson - Hidden Mothers published January, 2017. Larson’s premise is that in the victorian age when exposure times were lengthy, photographers would employ the practical hack of covering a chil’d mother with a cloth in order to calm the child for the length of time needed to sit still enough for a portrait which “unintentionally yielded an evocative representation of the mother; never meant to be seen”.
