Still Life with Mandarin Oranges + Motherhood

Still Life with Mandarin Oranges, one of the works in the collection Elements of the Garden began with a gift of homegrown mandarin oranges, still attached to their leaves.

While they didn’t come from my own garden, they still carried that same feeling I’m always drawn to: something freshly gathered, imperfect and connected to home. The leaves curled naturally, the oranges varied in color, and nothing about them felt overly polished. They were perfect in their imperfection.

As I arranged them in the studio, I kept noticing how painterly they already felt on their own.

The small bee in the photograph came from an unexpected moment. My son and I found him on the ground outside. He had died, but he was still intact with delicate wings and all the tiny details. I carefully pinned him onto one of the mandarins during the shoot and later retouched the pin out of the final image.

There’s something about that detail that feels important to me now. A small reminder of how much of this collection is tied to observation, noticing fleeting things that might otherwise be overlooked.

My son happened to be home sick from school the day I photographed this piece, so he was there through the entire process. He watched while I arranged the fruit, moved the camera, adjusted leaves, and photographed the scene. When the shoot was finally over, he happily ate the mandarins that had been sitting on set all afternoon.

As nerve-wracking as it can sometimes be having him close to the equipment and constantly underfoot while I work, I also wouldn’t want it any other way. I think motherhood has changed the way I create. Mothers rarely wait for the perfect quiet moment to begin something. We learn to make things alongside our children with interruptions, noise, curiosity, and small hands always nearby.

In many ways, this photograph became about creating calm amongst the chaos.

This image is part of the collection, Elements of the Garden, which is available here.