It was only 2pm and I had had it.

"Honey, I can't do this anymore," I said, waking my partner hours before his night-shift began by thrusting the baby into his arms.

"Go, I've got him," he replied groggily.

Driving to the coffee shop I daydreamed about driving as far away as possible. But I dragged myself out of the car, ordered my americano and pulled out my sketchbook, allowing my worries, my anxieties, and my rapidly developing postpartum depression pour out onto the page.

I started with drawing because it was a medium I could bring everywhere. Sketching at the park, at the museum, during those oh so short naps. I expanded into collage as the source material called to me. Those interior design catalogs with their images of picture-perfect houses; they demanded I transform them into my reality. 

Slowly out of these desperate moments, I developed a style of drawing I call chaos. The anxious, rapidly laid down scribbled lines pour around the page, as my subject emerges. My drawings express my frustration, my struggles with accepting my changing role as a caregiver and my anxiety over trying to find the brain capacity to communicate with my fellow adults again when at my core I was just burnt out.

The birds and beasts in my drawings are us: the mothers, caregivers, and unpaid laborers. As our needs aren't being met, we lose our humanity and become feral. Hungry we rage like the hippopotamus in our children's books, tired we become the snapping turtles, and burnt out we are the solitary ravens screeching into the void. I superimpose these animals into images from worn, torn and manipulated interior design magazines, layered with misplaced clutter. Altogether the process creates a portrait of domesticity: our feral selves.