Mixed media sculpture: Pine, brass, silver, freshwater pearls, AB Swarovski crystals, bone colouredcotton, Noodler’s Tianamen ink, various glass beads.

Made in honor of my beautiful partner Rose, who with my miscarriage of Tamlorn recently, has now lost 7 babies unborn. As we have no living children yet, she is frequently overlooked on Mother’s Day and rarely considered to be a ‘real’ mother by friends or during events. Added to the cultural pressure not to tell anyone about early pregnancy and not to mourn such losses as ‘real’ children, she has grieved and suffered silently for most of her life.

The title is borrowed from the Whovian/Palmer phrase bigger on the inside, referring to the TARDIS and the human capacity. The doll mother closes completely and locks shut. Once opened, 7 stranded pearls tumble from her broken heart, red rich, precious, and painful. They must be untangled to fall neatly.

To close her again, you have to touch the strands, to tuck them back into her heart. You must interact with and acknowledge them, and handle them carefully, or she will be ruined.

I love Rose deeply. She is still in profound, compounded, silenced, complicated grief. It is my passion and my joy to use my art to bring a voice to a topic so silenced, and so show her as I see her: however childless she appears on the outside, she is, like me, a mother on the inside.