Yellow Rattle

"The first six weeks post partum is known as the golden month—a period of rest and healing. It is also when a hormonal crash occurs as the body grapples with its recently cleaved state, often inducing depression, intense fatigue and delirium. The yellow in Yellow Rattle takes on golden pallor that dwells both in the warmth of sunrise and glistening colostrum, while at times erring into the sickly, choleric chartreuse of the body: jaundice, infection, iodine, urine and bruised flesh. Domestic settings are rendered uncanny in twilight hours as the birthing body is bound to the home and new life’s day blurs into night. The house becomes a world—the hallway a street, the lamp a sun. Also named for a semi-parasitic grassland wildflower whose seed-pods rattle in the autumn, and when crushed into an essence is used to assuage melancholia. The yellow-rattle flower is implemented by farmers to feed off and deplete vigorous grasses, eventually allowing more delicate species to thrive. Perhaps, adjacently, the birthing body (and mind) is depleted by the growth of a baby, and yet, with its birth, the physical and mental emptying of the self might permit a new kind of seed to germinate."