Ongoing series, 2023–present  

Series Overview

Gravid: Mothers of Monsters is an ongoing sculpture series rooted in the physical and creative sensation of gestation — the fullness of an idea not yet nameable, the dark churning of something growing within. “Gravid” means heavy with potential, full to the point of transformation. Done. The line now reads: The word arrived through conversation with a fellow artist as Midori was trying to articulate a sensation she could not yet name: a mass of creative force building inside, profound and not yet speakable. Each work in this series is an answer to that unnamed pressure.

The series draws on mythological figures — specifically, feminine and maternal beings across cultures who have been framed as the origin point of monsters. The artist reclaims these figures not as cautionary tales but as archetypes of fierce generative power. In this body of work, monstrousness is not pathology. It is that which is unknown to the average, that which possesses unusual or excessive power, that which is therefore feared, othered, and mythologized. The “monsters” these mothers birth are not evil — they are enormous, unknown, and transformative.

Each sculpture conceals an object within its body — partially visible, never fully revealed. This interior hiddenness is structural to the work: these pieces are about what is held inside, the power that accumulates before it is shown to the world, the creative potential that exists before it has a name. Materials are consistently reclaimed and repurposed: industrial rope, cast aluminum rings salvaged from a former retail space, fur scraps, and objects with personal or ecological significance. The studio itself is located in the former dressing rooms of a Dress Barn in the Tanforan Shopping Mall, South San Francisco — a space of transformation embedded in the discarded infrastructure of commerce.

Works in the series are named for mythological mothers of monsters, though they are not literal portraits of these figures. Each name is a lens, a provocation, an entry point into the larger question the series asks: what does it mean to be the source of something so powerful it frightens the world?

Works in the Series

Named for the Greek mythological figure known as the “Mother of All Monsters,” Echidna reclaims the legacy of a creature long cast in shadow. Half-woman, half-serpent, she embodies a threshold existence — liminal, layered, and powerfully misunderstood. Among her offspring: Cerberus, the Lernaean Hydra, the Chimera. Rather than warning or villain, this work frames her as a generative force of ferocity, care, and deep creative potential.

Constructed from rescued industrial rope, fur scraps, and an aluminum ring repurposed from a discarded retail display table, Echidna is dense with complexity while compact in form. Fur elements nestle within thick, knotted textures — partially hidden, partially revealed — offering both invitation and enigma. The coiled softness and tightly wrought mass evoke gestational potency, concealment, and the primal ambiguity of transformation.

This piece asks viewers to reconsider their own monstrousness as a site of creative force, unsettling beauty, and fierce, embodied wisdom.

Aglæcwif – Mothers of Monsters

Rooted in the legendary figure of Grendel’s mother from the Old English epic Beowulf, Aglæcwif reimagines this maligned “monster” as a potent symbol of nature and untamed power. Her Old English epithet — aglæcwif — has been translated variously as “wretch” and as “valiant warrior woman,” a scholarly debate that itself reveals the stakes of naming. She is never given a proper name in the text. She is defined entirely by her relationship to her son and to the violence done to him.

Grendel, her son, was a creature of the land, and Beowulf and his warriors were colonizing the territory where Grendel lived. Grendel’s mother fought to avenge his death. This work honors her as a fierce, generative presence connected to the land, vilified through the lens of conquest. She is also called “merewif” in the poem — water woman of the mere. This piece holds both: warrior and wilderness, mother and elemental force.

At the center of the sculpture, a manzanita root — native to California, gifted by Dr. Robert Lawrence — is woven into the rope structure upside down. A tree growing inverted is considered, in many traditions, a thing not of this world, possessed of other powers. The root arrived from a tree felled in a California storm, and carries with it the weight of land, loss, and transformation. It stands here as a monument to the wild and the wrongly named.

Inspired by the ancient Mesopotamian primordial goddess of the sea, Tiamat is simultaneously creator and destroyer — or rather, she is creator, and destruction is the name others gave her generative chaos. In the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, she births the first generation of gods from her union with Absu, the god of groundwater. When her husband is slain, she raises monsters as warriors in his name. She is killed by the storm god Marduk, who then builds the heavens and earth from her body.

She is described in some sources as a peaceful creator; in others, as a monstrous embodiment of primordial chaos. The difference is perspective. She is the same force, seen from different sides of power. The first dragons were hers, their bodies filled with poison instead of blood.

This sculpture holds that duality: the roiling, tidal generativity of a being who contains the world before the world is built. Fur is concealed within the work’s body — soft, warm, hidden — the interior life beneath the surface of a figure history chose to call catastrophic.

Series Note

Gravid: Mothers of Monsters is an ongoing series. Future works will continue to draw on mythological figures from diverse traditions — feminine, maternal, or otherwise generative presences whose power was recast as monstrosity by the cultures that recorded them. The artist welcomes suggestions of figures from underrepresented mythological traditions.

All works in the series share common formal elements: cast aluminum rings salvaged from discarded retail furniture, reclaimed rope, and concealed interior objects — materials that carry histories of use, abandonment, and repurposing. The studio is located in a former Dress Barn dressing room, Tanforan Shopping Mall, South San Francisco.

Series begun 2023. Ongoing.