Responses to the Birth Rites Collection

Over June/July 24, I participated in a residency at the Birth Rites Collection Summer School. Birth Rites is a collection of contemporary art currently held at the University of Kent, focusing on childbirth. During the Summer School, I developed a series of responses to the collection through drawing and collage, performances to camera and animations, which resulted in The Coronation (July 2024), Kneading Series (July 2024), and Lechon (July 2024). These short films and images were presented as part of a talk and sharing event at the University of Kent and online on 4th July 2024.

Transcript from discussion after Film presentations.

I wanted to look at that point of crowning as an image, as an action, as a point of transition. As a liminal space betwixt and between birthing and being born into motherhood – speaking to ideas of matrescence – becoming and (un)becoming mother. I wanted to play with visual puns/metaphors, humour and the conundrum of the chicken and the egg as well as a nod toward a description of female genitalia as the ‘Cocks Comb’ as described by 17th century midwife Jane Sharp in The midwives book, or, the whole art of midwifry discovered. The image plays with repetition, hoping to express cycles, time, the unrelenting experience of motherhood - the film presents 9 synchronised frames nodding to the 9 months of conscious pregnancy. The image loops back and returns to itself, the mother re-consumes the egg, ingesting/digesting motherhood - or perhaps denying the birth. The focus on the mouth as the birthing orifice might speak to ideas of consumption, and societal expectations, to being voiceless – the invisibility of mothering and that experience, leaning into visual ideas of oral fixation - and the passing down of language. The repetition of the image and the use of a chicken egg might also suggest narratives of battery farming and points towards conversations of reproductive rights.