Jocelyn Allen
I Have Started To Balance Things On My Head For B’s Amusement (30th December 2020)
Photography
2020
Born in Birmingham, UK, in 1988, I am an artist who mainly works with photography, text/hashtags, dance, performance and video.
I completed my first self-portraiture project in 2010 and have been primarily using myself within my personal work since. The themes that I often explore are hiding & revealing, body image, self-esteem, self-confidence and anxiety, and since 2019 my work has been about pregnancy and motherhood too.
My practice is very therapeutic for me and through it I am learning to accept myself and my body, whilst also building my confidence. It also helps me to process my thoughts and feelings, as well as document my life.
My photograph, I Have Started To Balance Things On My Head For B’s Amusement (30th December 2020), is from my self-portraiture series Oh Me, Oh Mãe. My two children are British-Portuguese, and Mãe is Portuguese for mother.
I started to make the project after the birth of my first child in June 2020, when the UK was still in its first Covid lockdown. As I had made a project about my pregnancy, I wanted to document early motherhood whilst being as honest as possible about my experiences. Each photograph in the project is accompanied by a diaristic text, which is usually in the form of long hashtags. I found it very cathartic as the global pandemic made me feel quite alone at times and I did struggle mentally for a while. The project came to a natural end in 2021 when I found out that I was pregnant with my second child, and I am now working on Oh Me, Oh Mãe II.
