This painting was a direct response to my experience of taking an Ecology course during undergrad. The course was anything but easy and I learned an enormous amount, but I think I was just mostly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what I didn’t know about the natural world.

One of those things was that ecologists can calculate a population’s growth over a period of time. It’s a formula that takes into consideration how many females of a species are in a given area (only females count), how many births happen in a certain period, how many offspring are usually produced in any event, the age of the females, how long they live, etc. It’s called “reproductive capacity”.

As a young person in my 30s, I was already pretty freaked out by the 20th century’s sharp “J curve” in human population and also concerned with a woman’s right to make decisions over what happens with her own body. So this formula really hit me in a strange way.

And in a world of war and death, women who bring more children into the world, are making soliders and killers. She brings life and she brings death. Creates and destroys. I might have called this work, Kali.

Occupation is a more accurate title though; a woman becomes “preoccupied” with children once they arrive, but it also describes what I think is the contested battlefield of a woman’s body and what society, religions, governments, families, think she ought to do with it. It’s what they want to do with her body and she must fight to keep it her own.

After 20 years, I think this painting is still quite relevant given the battles we’re still having to fight.

Feel free to leave comments below and start a discussion.