I collect mother baby art.
Pictures and sculptures. Including sculptures of pregnant women.
Most of the sculptures are from Denmark. It's partly because there was a woman in town whose parents emigrated here. She was selling sculptures and vases.
Most of the sculptures of pregnant women have no facial features. Some are pregnant, but a small child is also clinging to them. Also faceless. What does this mean?
One sculpture is abstract, with a nearly life size torso and abdomen, with no head. It has a neck with a softly rounded small swelling.
Only a few are Madonna and Child images or sculptures. Most are not.
I have a photograph that a friend gave my mother. It is the friend and 4 other pregnant women, all naked, all lined up on a couch. This is not an image one sees often.
I bought the Vanity Fair back when I was in medical school, where Demi Moore posed heavily pregnant. The young man at the register says, "Women shouldn't be seen like that."
"You mean pregnant?"
"Yeah."
I just bought the magazine. For that very reason. That women were not seen like that.
I have desks at work and at home. On my work desk is a tea set that my daughter brought me from Thailand. There is a photograph of my father in Sun Tui, his sailboat. Now mine, but I need to sell her.
I had my husband photograph me heavily pregnant. The best one is wearing a short kimono, that covers down to my thighs, but with the rounded moon belly showing. I am standing sideways in front of a window with plants, a ficus that is over my head. I like that one.
One Danish sculpture in clinic is wood. An abstract head curving over an abstract smaller head, the proportions suggesting a mother and child. Or a father and child.
What do you collect and why?