Matricentric Autoethnographic Diaries

Matricentric Autoethnographic Diary was written by artist Penny Davis between 2008 and 2025 (previously and during her PhD research) and was constructed from diaries and voice recordings. The diaries recount lived experiences from the perspective of being a single mother to three children and were used in the research to track patterns of reproductive work and maternal thinking through language analysis which would reveal recurrent similes, metaphors and symbolic imagery that became a springboard for her drawing practice. Diary writing was used as a way to identify recurrent conflicts and attend to maternal ambivalence in the moments that revealed hegemonic idealisations of normative motherhood in the research. Excerpts from the diary are included in the thesis Matricentric Drawing: Strategies for Visualising Reproductive Work and Maternal Thinking as a Single Mother. Due to the sensitive nature of the content identities have been anonymised and the files remain embargoed until the authors children reach adulthood.