Powdered Milk

At an exhibition opening earlier this week I struck up a conversation with one of the artists about our respective work. When I discussed my lactation project, she told me that she was breastfeeding her child at the time her own grandmother died, and as she cleaned out the matriarch's effects she came across her compact. For motivations unknown to me, she pressed the makeup to her breast, and the scent of her own milk mingled with the scent of her grandmother's face powder... As with much I have encountered this week, this story released a flood of emotions in me. The use of milk in beauty products, the lifeless powder damp with the lifegiving milk, the passing down of feminine rites and rituals...