At the moment I am slowly developing a collaborative practice with my son who was born in 2018. We live in a rural location in Kildare across from a native woodland and have a near daily practice of walking in the woods. In the early stages of his life, I often found myself grappling with a tenuous and morphing identity as a mother and an artist, struggling to reconcile the overlapping boundaries of the domestic and the studio space. This is not a unique experience but one that many new artist-parents inhabit. I have developed three bodies of work in response to him and during my initial period of 'mother-becoming': Strange Recordings, exhibited with the Glucksman in 2020 & Leaf Miner Walks and most recently ‘of the woods’ exhibited at MACi in Grenoble. The idea of matrescence, as expanded in Lucy Jones' pioneering texts, encapsulates this physical, physiological and psychological transformation of self. Rather than separating the various facets of my life, mother and artist, the emerging methodology has shown me how they coexist and can become a nourishing, generative enquiry.The woodland becomes our third collaborator.