In 2020, during the covid lockdowns I was pregnant and gave birth to my first child. My practice for the last 17 years has led me to many different site-specific projects, material explorations, folklores and mythologies, histories, literature, film and art- with an examination of female sexuality and the female gaze always at its core. So when I became pregnant, my research into the suppression of women’s sexuality and the portrayals of women’s desires as ‘animalistic’, ‘lunatic’, ‘monstrous’ became even more essential adding the urgency to reclaim those labels in my work and personal experiences.

 

Addressing sexuality in pregnancy and childbirth and the taboos surrounding maternal eroticism- I ask myself, as artist Anne Phillips questions:“A sexual act begins motherhood, why would the entire experience not relate back to sexuality?’

 

For the following 4 years (and two births later) I have been developing my body of work ‘Closing Bones’- a series of hand painted-multiple exposure photographs, sculpture and moving image. This body of work speaks of my own experiences of childbirth- a desire to connect with my metamorphosing body, with the other women around me who provided care and support (the midwives, friends- a collective strength) and the feelings/sensations of birth itself- the fear, pain, desire, tenderness, violence, euphoria, carnality. Examining practices and rituals performed collectively/individually that return to ‘the wild woman’- to the primal nature of birth to evoke an unapologetic, uncensored representation of female bodies that do not always fit into the idea of what is ‘feminine’.