I make paintings about inheritance — about what a body carries when it is no longer able to carry a child, and about the quiet, structural intelligence of a species that does not measure a female's worth by her fertility.
I paint as a woman who entered menopause at thirty-three, in a world that still expects that door to open somewhere closer to forty-five or later. The work began, in part, as a way to survive the early closing of that door — to understand what a life becomes when it is released from the biological clock most of culture still uses to tell a woman what she is for.
The orca taught me how to hold this.
Female orcas and female humans are two of only a handful of species on earth whose bodies are designed to keep living, fully and powerfully, long after the capacity to reproduce has ended. An orca mother typically stops breeding somewhere around forty, then continues on for another thirty, forty, even fifty years.
She does not recede. She becomes the center.
The matriarch. The memory of the pod. The one who knows where the salmon will be in a bad year, who teaches the hunt, who holds the dialect, who leads the family through waters her daughters have never seen. Her worth multiplies after her fertility ends — not before.
I am, by that measure, an early matriarch. And I have had to learn, with the help of these animals, that ending one kind of making does not end the making. It changes the medium. My body stopped producing the child it was expected to produce. My hands kept producing. My lineage kept producing.
The painting became the calf.
In 2018, off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, an orca named Tahlequah gave birth to a calf that lived for thirty minutes. She then carried the body of her daughter on her head, pushing it to the surface for seventeen days across open ocean. In 2024 she lost another calf and began the ritual again.
It is one of the clearest animal expressions of maternal grief ever documented. The body is not released because the bond is not released. The ocean becomes a wake. The pod slows. Other females help carry the loss.
This is where the distance between orca grief and human grief becomes very small. Both species are highly social. Both form lifelong maternal bonds. Both grieve in the body before the mind can explain it. Refusal, carrying, altered appetite, altered sound, reorganization of the family, and the long afterlife of attachment all belong to both. The loss of a calf changes the whole group. The loss of an imagined child changes the whole self.
I recognize myself inside that structure of grief. The grief of early menopause is not always visible, but it is real. It is the grief of a future that closed before its expected season — the grief of a body becoming something else while the world still speaks to it as though nothing has changed.
The orca gave me a language for that grief that was neither clinical nor ashamed. Just carried. Until the carrying became the work.
What matters most to me is this: in orca society, a female who cannot breed, or no longer breeds, is not diminished. She is often more important. Post-reproductive females become teachers, navigators, memory keepers, protectors. They guide younger kin to food. They support the survival of sons and daughters. They stabilize the pod.
Reproduction is not the end of usefulness. It is only one chapter of usefulness.
I think about this every time I am in the studio. I am not making a child. I am making a call. I am making a trait that might be passed forward. I am doing the work of a matriarch who began her second life at thirty-three instead of forty-five — and who has decided that the second life is not a consolation prize.
It is the larger life. It is the one the species actually needs.
So does she.