Maps to Milk: From Urgency to Stillness

The Origin: A Window Seat and a Camera

Maps to Milk started before I knew it had a name. It started on aeroplanes, looking out the window at 30,000 feet with my phone pressed against the glass, photographing coastlines and mountain ranges and city grids that looked nothing like the places I knew from the ground.

From up there, borders disappear. Countries merge into terrain. The road your grandmother fled on looks the same as the one your daughter will learn to drive on. Everything is connected, and nothing is as separate as it seems from the ground.

I started collecting these photographs without a plan. Lebanon, Italy, Portugal, Australia. Every flight was another map. Another piece of terrain I carried with me.

What does “Maps to Milk” actually mean?

Maps represent the world. Travel. Production. Movement. Urgency. The constant motion of exhibiting internationally, building a career, searching for identity across continents.

Milk represents motherhood. Stillness. Being present. Nourishment. The radical shift from doing to being that happened when my daughter arrived.

The Turning Point: Motherhood

When I had my baby, people said things like: “You’re not going to have time to do any art making when you have kids.” And: “Remember when you said you’d be painting all the time? Wasn’t that funny?”

That irked my skin.

Because the truth is the opposite. I’m more productive and more intentional than I have ever been. I understand the value of my time now. Before, I didn’t. I work approximately ten focused hours per week across two to three days, and I make every one of them count.

Motherhood didn’t end my practice. It refined it. It taught me that stillness is not failure. Being present is productive. Rest is not weakness.

The Process: Embedding the Invisible

How do the aerial photographs end up inside the painting?

I source the aerial photography of a specific location, whether it’s one I captured from a plane window or one I research for a bespoke commission. That photograph is embedded into the foundational layer of the canvas. It becomes part of the painting’s bones.

Then I build over it. Thick acrylic. Heavy texture. Warm earths and golds and charcoals. Layer after layer, built up over weeks.

The finished painting reads as a richly textured abstract. But underneath every brushstroke is a real aerial map. Real GPS coordinates. A real place that shaped someone’s life.

Why hide the map?

Because the most meaningful things aren’t always visible. The places that shaped us live inside us, not on the surface. A painting that holds your grandmother’s homeland underneath layers of acrylic is more honest than one that spells it out. You know it’s there. That’s what matters.

What’s Next for Maps to Milk

This series is ongoing. Every new commission adds a new map, a new set of coordinates, a new story. I’m particularly interested in paintings that hold multiple locations, where the journey from one place to another is embedded in the layers. A homeland and the suburb where someone settled. The hospital where a child was born and the coastline a mother left behind.

Maps to Milk is my most personal body of work, and it’s the one that resonates most deeply with my collectors. Because it speaks to anyone who has ever held two places in their chest at the same time.