Dawn Yow
Touched Out
Photography
2015
Sitting, and climbing, and hanging, and crawling, and pawing, and scratching, and grabbing, and gnawing, and poking, and mishandling, and pinching, and squeezing, and kicking, and kneeing, and sliding, and bouncing, and holding, and patting, and stroking, and kissing, and hugging. My body is not mine.
Dawn Yow’s background is in evolutionary psychology, biology, and anthropology but she is now an artist-photographer. Having started off in street photography, she now uses the camera as an autobiographical tool to explore the roller coaster that is motherhood. She documents the challenges inherent in the lives of many mothers, finding beauty in the seemingly banal, the visceral, the overlooked, and the raw moments highlighting the trials and tribulations of life with children. Her images chronicle the theatre of everyday childhood and all its accompanying emotions, following the peaks and troughs of domesticity. They bring to the forefront the private, unseen, discomforting moments that deserve to be honoured alongside the shining ones in the spectrum of motherhood. Functioning simultaneously as a portrait of parenthood and childhood, the images aim to peel back the artifice, dispelling the romantic, oversentimentalised and sterilized myths of motherhood common in public discourse, and highlighting the intensity and universality of the child-rearing experience.
Her work has been featured in magazines, exhibited in London, Liverpool, and Edinburgh, as well as in many online exhibitions. When she is not attached to her cameras, she lives amongst the pandemonium, mess, and wonder created by the three sprightly children she homeschools and is responsible for. Although she is Canadian, she lived in Liverpool, UK for 8 years, but is currently in a liminal state, as she seeks out her next city of residence.
