Got milk?
Maggie Anderson - The Daily Iowan
Issue date: 3/22/07 Section: 80 Hours
- Page 1 of 1
|
Both are counting - Maurelli the number of cookies she has made (more than five batches today, 13 cookies per batch, for a projected grand total of 1,000 by the end of the week) and Drulis the amount of milk she has bathed in hot water to remove harmful viruses and bacteria (four batches today, 43 bottles per batch, for a grand total of approximately 580 ounces by the end of the day).
Both are filling plastic tubs with their products - Maurelli has four tubs in her freezer and Drulis eight in hers.
And both have one thing on the mind: women's breasts.
Maurelli and Drulis come by this infatuation naturally. The other interested demographic has a natural interest as well, of course, but Maurelli's and Drulis' are concerns of perhaps an unexpected - and certainly more philanthropic - character.
Drulis is a cofounder of the Mother's Milk Bank of Iowa, a subdivision of the Iowa Children's Hospital housed at the UI Hospitals and Clinics. Operating on a principle similar to that of a blood bank, the Milk Bank takes donations from mothers with surplus breast milk. In some cases, these donors are women who have lost a child; other times, they are women who produce more milk than their own child needs. The milk is used largely to feed premature infants who are unable to suckle and whose mothers have not begun producing milk.
And Maurelli, a UI printmaking M.F.A. candidate, creates work that deals with the idea of the human body as a machine. In particular, she is interested in how a woman's body functions after she has a baby and how lactation can become an experience akin to working an assembly line - something the 36-year-old experienced herself two-and-a-half years ago, when she birthed her daughter, Teagan. She said words such as industry, supply and demand, and production that are most commonly applied to mechanical operations seemed to also describe her perception of her postpartum body.
"The whole thing is like one big combustion engine," she said.
Maurelli's latest project, which she will present at the Southern Graphics Council's annual conference this weekend in Kansas City, Mo., forms the link between these two milk connoisseurs as well as an explanation for the aforementioned baking marathon. As Maurelli explained in an e-mail, she is making "boob cookies" that she will hand out at the conference. She will give all monetary donations she receives to the Mother's Milk Bank.
Though her previous work had also been autobiographical, this project is perhaps the most personal for fairly obvious reasons - in her written thesis, Maurelli even details her experience with lactating during class and the steps she went through every time she pumped the milk from her breasts.
Maurelli said she began producing work in this vein when she felt as though she had hit a sort of rut in her work.
"I knew when I came [to the UI] that my work was going to change dramatically," the artist said. And with the overwhelming sense of immersion in her body's processes following her daughter's birth, she really couldn't think about anything but breasts. These life-giving organs and their functions became a recurring motif in her work.
"If you were to look at [milk ducts] under a microscope, they look like trees with little bulbs at the ends of the branches," she said. She hopes such images, which appear abstracted and ethereal in print form, will prompt contemplation and a re-evaluation of the way breasts are largely portrayed.
"In our contemporary culture, the female breast has been over-sexualized, over-commercialized, and over-politicized," writes Maurelli in her thesis, titled Machine at My Breast (which she dedicates: "To Teagan, *little sucker*"). "I chose images of the breast that I felt acknowledged the established interpretation of their sexuality, while concurrently providing me room to inject my own meaning."
All this time, Maurelli, who studied at the Tamarind Institute, the world's only school for professional printmakers, located in Albuquerque, N.M., was still working in the traditional print format. As an art form, printmaking is distinct in that it creates multiple originals.
At Tamarind, which accepts just eight students each year and allows just two to continue into the second year, Maurelli earned the prestigious title of Master Printer. In this capacity, she collaborates with an artist, gallery, or museum to develop an image based on an existing artwork, and then she carries out the physical act of printing. For example, earth artists such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude (who created the installation The Gates in New York City's Central Park in 2005) cannot easily make a living by selling their projects - but a collaboration with master printers to create editioned works allows their art to be purchased.
Maurelli stressed that prints are not reproductions but all original works in their own right. The rationale for making prints is twofold in her mind. First, there's a question of marketability.
"It's easier for a collector to part with $550 for a print than $5,000 for a painting," she said, gesturing around her friend's house as an example: Framed prints practically blanket the cheery, cherry-red walls.
Second, there is the idea that a greater number will result in a greater visual impact.
"If you have an image and you have that image repeated over and over, it adds significance," she said as she plucked cookies from one of the five sheets she was juggling.
Then, in the summer of 2005, the petite redhead took a drawing class that challenged her idea of what constitutes a print.
"Out of some stroke of genius or insanity, I'm not entirely sure which, I made a couple of batches of cookies and frosted them to look like breasts," she said.
She repeated the project for the 2005 Iowa Arts Festival. She walked around downtown with Teagan, handing out cookies and taking donations for Heifer International, a nonprofit organization that aims to help end world hunger and poverty by teaching concepts of self-reliance and sustainability. The money that Maurelli raised was used to purchase a goat for a community.
"In that way, I was using my artwork to feed a community," she said, noting the parallel between this action and that of a mother using her milk to feed her child.
Despite this nontraditional, practically performance-art project, Maurelli considers her cookies to be prints.
"I'm basically editioning 1,000 cookies; it's just that the medium is different from what you might think of as a print," she said. In fact, for her Kansas City cookie project, Maurelli is even applying her ideas about print quantity and increased effect.
"My hope is that seeing 1,000 cookies shaped like breasts is going to add significance to the idea of our bodies as machines," she said.
The cookies themselves are not intended to be representations of realistic human breasts but rather as abstractions. The circular sugar cookies are iced with white frosting and a centered pink frosting nipple, rather than a skin-toned cookie that would be more suggestive.
"These have to be a symbol," she said. "If they get too realistic, they address all those issues of sex. I'm thinking more about function."
Maurelli's donation to the Mother's Milk Bank will also maintain her concept of being a metaphorical mother through her work. Drulis said Maurelli's donation will provide funds to send a week's worth of milk home with a preemie once the baby is healthy enough to leave hospital.
As the Milk Bank's sole full-time employee, Drulis has recruited and screened milk donors, collected their milk, and then pasteurized, catalogued, and stored it until it is distributed, since the bank's opening in 2002. The pasteurization facility on the Oakdale campusconsists of a shaking water-bath pasteurizer about the size of a large microwave, and several freezers.
The pasteurizer holds 43 bottles, and each batch takes approximately an hour, with 30 minutes at 144 degrees Fahrenheit. Drulis said it's important to maintain this particular temperature - it is hot enough to kill any harmful bacteria and viruses in the milk (though she stresses that donors are carefully screened, and the bank has never had a health scare about its breast milk) but maintains the valuable natural antibodies present.
The bank is one of just 12 in all of North America serving an ever-increasing population. Technological advances have allowed babies as small as one pound to live, leaving more infants than ever in need of donated milk. Last year, the bank distributed 32,000 ounces, and it anticipates demand for 35,000 to 40,000 this year. All these donations came from slightly more than 80 donors. The average contribution is 500 ounces, and Drulis said she even had one donor give 9,000 ounces. Of course, there's no way to guarantee how much milk a mother is physically able to produce; some women just naturally lactate more than others. But research continues to prove that breast milk is the healthiest option for newborns, particularly the fragile preemies.
"Human milk is both a medicine and a nutrition," the 59-year-old Drulis said, explaining that formula can never replicate human milk's ability to transfer immunities to a baby. "The premature infants are much more complicated to feed than healthy babies. They really need a mother's milk."
Part of Maurelli's interest in premature babies stems from personal experience - Teagan was born prematurely, but Maurelli was lucky enough to begin producing milk early enough and the child was strong enough to suckle. At her peak production, Maurelli said, she was producing as much as three-quarters of a gallon per day.
"That's like, a lot," Maurelli said, nodding for emphasis and illustrating her point by pointing to a half gallon of milk from the fridge. "Now, I think about it, and it grosses me out. There's this dichotomy between beauty and the crazy, out-of-control quality."
It's this gross-out factor that Maurelli is in part attempting to debunk with her work. The breast's function as a feeding mechanism is one of the most basic a woman's body can perform, and Maurelli finds it irritating when a fuss is made about mothers breastfeeding in public.
"I just get all crabby," she said, citing in particular an incident in 2006 when a breastfeeding mother pictured on the cover of Babytalk magazine drew readers' criticism. The publication, a free magazine most often seen in hospital waiting rooms, has a readership consisting overwhelmingly of mothers, but the cover still sparked outrage from readers and some political conservatives, such as talk-radio powerhouse Rush Limbaugh.
"It's really not an ugly thing," she said. "When you get right down to it, it's really lovely that our bodies function in this way.
"I think that my goal in all of this is to raise awareness. I make art about what I think about. I take comfort in working with the body, because it's something that I'll always have."
E-mail DI reporter Maggie Anderson at:
margaret-anderson@uiowa.edu
The Mother's Milk Bank of Iowa by the numbers
- 35,000-40,000 - The projected need, in ounces, of milk for next year.
- 9,000 - The highest number of ounces a donor contributed last year.
- 650 - The number of babies fed donated human milk over the past three and a half years.
- 200 - The minimum donation of milk per year, in ounces.
- 144 - The temperature, in degrees Fahrenheit, that the milk must be pasteurized at for 30 minutes to kill harmful agents and maintain beneficial ones.
- 80 - The number of donors to the bank last year.
- 1.3 - The number of full-time employees at the bank.
- 1 - The number of operating pasteurizers on the Oakdale campus.
Source: Jean Drulis, co-founder, Mother's Milk Bank of Iowa
Want to know more?
Learn more about the UI Mother's Milk Bank at its website
The Human Milk Banking Association of North America creates guidelines to regulate all of the milk banks on the continent, and has a wealth of further information about human milk banks at its site
Information about the Southern Graphics Council's annual conference, which Erin Maurelli is attending, can be found here at its site
Be the first to comment on this story