Ruta Saksens Kalmane
The Last Drop Makes the Cup Run Over
Inspired by my daily life as a full-time mother to a toddler, the project ‘The Last Drop Makes the Cup Run Over’ is a mirror of my mental state of mind as a parent, illustrating through photomontages of nature photography the overwhelming feelings arising from frustration, sensory overload, sleep deprivation, emotional meltdowns, and increased stress level caused by being a parent of a young child.
Raising a toddler can be a bittersweet experience, often leaving the parent exhausted, unable to focus, feeling extremely irritated, frustrated and off-balance, and reaching a burnout. Such feelings can be caused by sensory overstimulation, reaching the neurological threshold of one or more senses. When constantly being triggered to the point the last drop makes the cup run over, our true identity and inner peace are hijacked by flight-or-fight reflexes. Using photography as a therapy to regain balance in life, this project is a projection of motherhood emotional struggles which are presented through images of the natural world, depicting intense frustration sublimated into digital photomontages consisting of digital photographic and pinhole images.
Online Photography Exhibition
The project ‘The Last Drop Makes the Cup Run Over’ can be seen virtually in a form of an online photography exhibition available from Artsteps.com platform:
Collective Artwork Exhibition
The digital photomontage "Headache" (2023) from the project ‘The Last Drop Makes the Cup Run Over’ was exhibited on February 10, 2024, during the Gigalerie art exhibition at the GIGANT building in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. Gigalerie hosted more than 100 individual artworks by artists from the Dutch Apeldoorn region.
In response to the global environmental crisis, the photomontage "Headache" is produced in an environmentally friendly manner and printed on biodegradable cardboard.
