mother
Considerations for lactation with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Repurposed mooring chain, concrete, physio band.
The extreme tension and overextension of navigating pregnancy and early parenthood with a chronic health condition. The inadequacy of care provided by an overstretched system forcing you to become your own expert. Being seen as an unrealiable narrator due to your body's illegibility. The effort to look after your baby, and yourself, amidst the resultant shame, confusion, and misinformation.
Multitudes. Fragments of poetry written across family ephemera: drawings with my toddler, NHS postpartum guidance, appointment letters.
As a mother I find myself spread across multiple bodies and temporalities, the centre of my being no longer residing in myself. The me that once was no longer exists, and instead I operate across fragmented, halting, and hybridised realities, I am a chimera. This finds an echo in the phenomenon of foetal microchimerism, where foetal stem cells travel into the parent's body via the placenta. These cells integrate into the parent's system, with helpful, harmful, and neutral effects: I am a mosaic, whether they were born or not, I carry my children with me and am forever a multitude.
Breast(chest)-feeding as social behaviour | support circle. Five witch's ladders of nettle yarn with buzzard, guinea fowl, and chicken feathers, dried yarrow, angelica, and fennel, and maternity bra shaping inserts.
A reference to a study detailing how nursing is not an innate behaviour in the primate species: without community guidance, parents cannot learn how to feed their babies. This is at odds with societal narratives around breast/chest-feeding, so often aligned with naturalness, ease/bliss, and a parent's individual moral superiority.
Witch's ladders are traced back to an 1878 find, classed as a witch tool by the man who sought to exhibit it, he surmised that it was for stealing milk of neighbour's cows, or crossing into other people's homes. Seeking to queer the reading, and re-appropriate their intent, I have envisioned the witch's ladder as a communally cast spell, where members of a circle support a parent struggling to feed their child. Stealing milk from neighbours becomes donating milk to someone who needs it, crossing into another's home becomes a reminder to show up physically and emotionally for a struggling parent. Cis-heteronormative patriarchy cannot understand or support the systems of care that birth and sustain us, it must be undone.
Each of the five ladders is made to the dimensions of someone who supported me as I learned to feed my children.
Latch. Repurposed mooring chain and my worst maternity bras.
Renegotiations of identity as a result of pregnancy and parenthood.
How cis-heteronormative patriarchy forces a narrative on this experience.
Some works from this project were shown as part of Abject Bodies, a joint exhibition with glass artist Ames Truscott.
Drawing from pregnancy, birthing, endometriosis, and chronic pain, this show platformed the tension felt living the liberation of a non-binary body while having to operate in a patriarchal system that imposes gender on your story.
This show was supported by the Hospitalfield Graduate Programme, Birnam Arts, Hope Scott Trust, and Scottish Glass Society.