Jenna Lee Alldread is a maker, illustrator and printmaker based in West Yorkshire. She loves creating endearing characters and applying them to a variety of surfaces including textiles and wood.
“I gave birth to my first child a week before we went into a national lockdown. He came early – he was due to arrive a month or so into the lockdown. It actually felt lucky that he arrived sooner and not in the height of all the hospital restrictions. At the time, I really remember not being able to distinguish between the ‘normal’ vulnerability of being a new parent or the heightened paranoia of an unknown virus sweeping the world.
I felt in a state of anxiousness (and awe) for the first few weeks, locked away, with a new baby and no visitors, slowly recovering from a very swift emergency c-section, learning how to breastfeed via zoom with the health visitors and the midwives. It felt wonderful, like he was a blessing in amongst the madness, but oh so scary and frightening and… would anything be the same again? What kind of world was this to arrive into?
Having quite a traumatic birth, I was unable to walk or stand for a long time after. Recovery felt much harder than I had ever anticipated. I am an Illustrator and had a yearning to draw through this time and continue with freelance projects, but was unable to use anything other than my iPad, cradling a sleeping baby in one arm and drawing with the other. It seems quite fitting that my drawings are digital – the only medium I could comfortably use at that time.
I drew these in March 2020 with a loose intention for them becoming a zine to document the time, but as the demands of motherhood grew, I hadn’t revisited these, or even looked at them until I read about the call out for this exhibition. I feel that these drawings could sit amongst a wider narrative around what it felt like at that specific time to have a newborn ; for me, a mixture of anxiety and the overwhelming urge to protect.”
