Many of Sierra’s photographs feel like they were constructed by a painter, by someone facing the blank canvas while imagining the colors taking shape. If an image feels like a 16^th century Madonna, it’s not because Sierra is recreating particular paintings, it’s because she innately creates with a similar language. Her compositions are intuitive and exciting. Backgrounds are obscured by deep shadows; fabrics and textures come forward and take center stage. Planes of space are compressed. Normal signifiers of domestic life recede, and a new space is revealed, one where the emotions that pass between parent and child are made visible.

Contemporary photographers who are mothers are not afraid to share the tensions in the vocation, between beauty and maddening chaos, between the strength mothering requires, and the sense of self that can disappear amidst all the work of parenting. Sierra, illustrating her own experience of motherhood, touches on these pressures, and also has something else distinct and valuable to add to the dialogue.

Her aesthetics are so singular that they give way to a more complex conversation about parenting and caretaking. In one photograph, her son lies on the ground looking upwards. A shadow stretches across his chest and morphs into his mother’s silhouette on the wall behind him. It’s as if the boy is birthing the shadow- as if he has somehow delivered her form into being, and not the other way around. In other photographs, her own father comes into the picture, and Sierra shifts from the role of parent to that of daughter. Viewers are left with much to think about in their own family relationships, and of what it means to hold onto oneself while loving another.

- Mia + Lisa

See more of Anastasia Sierra’s work HERE

Anastasia Sierra received second place in this year’s prestigious Life Framer Series Award, juried by Mia Dalglish and Lisa Woodward. This competition receives submissions from all around the world, and one exceptional series is selected each year for a solo exhibition.