Double Consciousness Infinity Mirror (Doula Nicky Dawkins)

Doula Nicky Dawkins (Mama Spa Botanica collaborator) is infinitely reflected 9 months pregnant as she prepares for labor on the front lines of the birthing justice crisis crowning in Miami during the 2021 corona virus pandemic, where doulas are forbidden from delivery rooms. Nicky describes the infinite burden of double consciousness when birthing in America as a black, Jamaican doula during a conversation with the artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer. The street installation documents their intimate conversation concluding in the Infinite Double Consciousness maxim: "Be Your Own Mom" to survive. Infinitely reproduce agency, confidence and self-hood to bear the burden of laboring and delivering offspring, a black mother must preserve herself as an umbilical extension of community care. Nicky's infinite reflection renders our procreative surveillance as a site for political discourse for the critical resistance and vivid reconstruction of biological and biographical family structures.

Nicky's life-saving reproductive justice work with Period Market, Southern Birth Justice Network & Period Movement Miami as well as her life-giving doula work, is a radical reconstruction of self regard as community regard in a wellness centered city with the highest infant and maternal death rate in the US for black birthing people in hospitals.

Embodied in a multi-dimensional image reflected within the history of surveillance, security aesthetics and greenscreen- the depiction of Nicky's bold work resists violent stigmas and advertising archetypes using her life-saving doula and direct action advocacy work as a vivid contrast to the violent policies absorbed by diasporic nieghbors.

Despite the increasing erasure of low income Q+BIPOC, immigrant kin Nicky's apparition is a call and response between the viewer and the subject, light/dark, safety/vulnerability, and history/future. Ancestral cultural preservation practices by Griot Doulas like Nicky, improves the material conditions of maternal health crisis survivors and their families. In Nicky’s words, “Hospitals are doing to black mothers on the labor wards what police are doing to our men on the streets”.