La Grossesse de Nicole (age 20)

Helen Barchilon Redman, now in her eighties, lives in San Diego but is still connected to Boulder, Colorado where she spent a significant portion of her adult life enmshed in that city’s feminist art community. While five months pregnant with her second daughter, Nicole, Redman’s first daughter, sixteen-month old toddler daughter Paula, died suddenly of a bacterial infection. Redman and her then-husband relocated to Paris for a short period to get away from the deeply painful feelings of loss, and Redman recorded and reflected on her experiences in an expansive series of portraits of herself and, once born, of Nicole. Redman’s work is an intimate, compulsive portrait series of paradoxical loss in the face of new life. This painting depicts Nicole as an adult when she was pregnant with her own child, Redman’s granddaughter, Shira. All of Redman’s family appear in her portraiture, and there is an especially strong theme of matrilineal connection and generational ties.