A Philly artist's 'Milkscapes' fabric patterns honors mothers
- aimeekoran
- May 19
- 1 min read
In 2016, artist Aimee Koran — who had recently given birth to her first child, a daughter — accidentally spilled breast milk in her studio while pumping. Dismayed by the accident, she went to throw away the sheet of transparent mylar film where the milk had spilled only to notice the abstract image the dried milk created. It was beautiful, almost ethereal, and somehow otherworldly. That’s how Koran’s series of images titled Milkscapes came into being.
Koran, now a single mother to 6- and 10-year olds, explained that Milkscapes was “made by pouring a small amount of my breast milk onto a sheet of glass.” The milk dries in abstract shapes, “highlighting an otherwise invisible labor.” The glass is then photographed and printed to billboard scale. An intimate, yet highly labored and nuanced routine transforms into a blown-out and large object that draws attention — “suggesting how personal space becomes blurred or even nonexistent as a mother.”
A Milkscapes pattern has now made its way to a more recent project called MSS.
“What would a uniform for mothers look like?” Koran asked herself at the genesis of MSS. “So that’s how thinking around the MSS suit started, which eventually evolved into this astronaut training/boiler suit.”