Stephanie O’Connor’s series The Waves Came in Like Horses presents layered photographs that merge environment, botanical, and anatomical forms, creating a visual field that feels both intimate and alien.
Origins in Lockdown
Five years ago, during a period of strict stay-at-home orders, the photographer began assembling images from discarded photographs, book pages, and old negatives. The activity served as a way to keep creating while movement outside was limited.
Later, she set the material aside, describing the early composites as conceptually empty. The fragments remained in storage, awaiting a new context that could give them relevance.
Pregnancy as Creative Catalyst
When O’Connor entered her first pregnancy, she revisited the stored pieces. The images had a renewed energy. There was this sense of movement inside her body, kicking, shifting, these strange, internal sensations. And suddenly the work felt alive.
She explains that the series is inseparable from that gestational period, noting that the images now echo the internal trends she experienced while carrying a child.
Constructing the Composite
Each photograph is built from dozens of elements, including environment shots taken years earlier in New Zealand, cut-outs from European scenery, vintage negatives, and recent pictures captured during pregnancy. Some images are made from 15 different pieces.
The resulting scenes are deliberately unreal, allowing the artist to convey a deeper truth about the pregnant body through imagined forms rather than literal representation.
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O’Connor’s workflow relies on intuition rather than strict planning. As a seasoned post-production artist, she layers elements until a composition feels resonant, describing the practice as meditative and therapeutic during her pregnancy.
The visual language balances familiarity with strangeness. Light often obscures human silhouettes, while kelp-like textures ripple across clouded surfaces, preventing a fixed sense of scale or time.
These qualities mirror the porous boundary between self and other that pregnancy creates, a condition O’Connor likens to the scientific phenomenon of microchimerism, where fetal cells persist in the parent’s body for decades.
In the series, the exchange of cells becomes a visual metaphor: fragments of disparate sources fuse into hybrid bodies, suggesting a shared, shifting state of being rather than a single, stable identity.
While the work draws on personal experience, it also highlights a broader gap in scientific understanding. There is too little scientific research into the female body, so we often end up relying on anecdotal accounts, and that can feel quite unsettling, not fully grasping what’s happening inside you.
She adds that the images aim to acknowledge the discomfort and unfamiliarity that can accompany gestation, offering a visual space where intimacy and distance coexist.
