At Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, The Ecology of Care explored themes of motherhood, care, and connection through art, photography, and music—highlighting community, resilience, and maternal wellbeing.
Author: lccreagh
A multi-disciplinary artist working in the UK. Projects are collaborative and include photography, video, animation, installation and sound. For more details visit www.lisacreagh.com.
Measuring Impact
Researchers at Wolverhampton University are gathering data on Holding Time’s impact on the community online and offline through surveys about breastfeeding attitudes
In this BLOG post Dr Lisa J. Orchard, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the Faculty of Education, Health and Wellbeing at the University of Wolverhampton, introduces their innovative study, designed to measure the impact of the Holding Time Project on viewers. Please add your data to the survey!
Dr Vicky Fallon: Words and Power
Breastfeeding has profound and long-lasting health advantages, but the risks of poor maternal well-being run just as deep. The “breast is best” message has, in many cases, done more harm than good for both breastfeeding and formula feeding women. Words carry a lot of power and we need to be very careful of their use in future breastfeeding promotion campaigns.
For many, the current WHO recommendation of six months of exclusive breastfeeding is simply not realistic and can discourage mothers from even initiating breastfeeding. Instead we should follow a woman-centred approach where mothers are empowered to set their own realistic targets.
Hear Us Roar! Open Eye Launch
With an audience of NHS staff, the social prescribing Team from WHAM, members of the local CCG and local breastfeeding mentors, the performances by mothers were entertaining, moving and full of meaning.
VR: mapping out the future
This year I received a prestigious DYCP Arts Council grant to explore the possibilities of Holding Time in VR. I set about researching the potential of VR to be a new way of showing the animation installation without the need for a ‘real’ space.
Coventry Daze: Holding Time and Coventry City of Breastfeeding 2021
In Coventry Daze, Lisa Creagh reflects on creating Holding Time’s Coventry project during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mothers from diverse backgrounds took part in Zoom interviews, storytelling workshops, portrait sessions and exhibitions, resulting in writing, animated portraits, films and permanent hospital artworks. The project celebrated breastfeeding while exploring cultural, structural and emotional barriers.
Bonding: Advice for New Mothers from Midwife Angelina Steinegger
In this Holding Time article, postnatal lead midwife Angelina Steinegger reflects on bonding and attachment in the first hours, weeks and months of a baby’s life. She explores the importance of holding, talking, singing, massage, skin-to-skin contact and responsive caregiving, while reassuring parents that bonding is a gradual process rather than something that must happen immediately after birth.
‘Takeover Tuesday’ Interview
AAF asked me to take over their Instagram feed one Tuesday recently and I had to accept, given their huge … More
Liverpool Collaborative Research Group Presentation
In my aim to bring The Holding Time Project to areas where breastfeeding is lowest, I came to appreciate the … More
Presentation at Warwick University Maternity Themed Clinical Trials Launch
I spoke about my project and the aims of partnering with the CTU for Coventry City of Culture. I showed the animated portraits, as well as a slideshow of stills. it was the first time I had presented the work in a meidcal setting and I found the atmosphere invigorating. It gave me new insight into how clinical trials lead the way to greater understanding of new approaches.
Presentation at BFN Conference 2019
For this event I put together a slideshow, beginning with the story of my own struggles to breastfeed, then the rationale for the Holding Time still images, how these lead to the animation and installation. Finally I talked about the project website, the breastfeeding Hubs, the YouTube Channel interviews.
This Dark Matter
by Lisa Creagh, First published at http://www.lisacreagh.com, July 2018 The theme of this years’ Photography festival Recontres d’Arles was Geopolitics, … More
Thoughts from ONCA
Over the past few weeks I have been at the gallery every day. Sometimes I just sat on the beanbags and enjoyed the quiet. Other days I had others to join me: Lucila came almost every day. Many mothers came with their children. But also quite a few fathers. And others who had never had children; young women interested in the subject with their boyfriends, mothers whose babies had grown, mothers who had not breastfed, mothers who were still breastfeeding their four year old, mothers with newborns still struggling with the adjustment to motherhood.
Why Now?
In the UK, breastfeeding has been recognised as having a major role to play in public health and in reducing health inequalities, and has been translated into policy programmes such as the Baby Friendly Initiative that accredits health care facilities that adopt recognised best practice standards for breastfeeding. However, less than 1% of babies are exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life (Bolling et al., 2007). Not only that, a comprehensive review series on breastfeeding in The Lancet, published on 30 January this year, gave a clear signal of what is needed to be done and pointed at Britain as having “the worst breastfeeding rates in the world”.
The Ecology of Breastfeeding
Breastfeeding is food. It is part of the wider network of food production and relations. The food of love, as it has been called. And it is. Breastfeeding provides sustenance and nourishment and love in one swift gesture.
Taking our Time
Birth and breastfeeding are an invitation to enter into another domain of time. Or more accurately, to be intime, to be grounded in the cycle of life.
Breastfeeding in Public: This Discomfort Matters
Breastfeeding is not the norm in the UK, and breastfeeding in public can be especially daunting to a new mother. The anxiety that many women face shows that. In the last Infant Feeding Survey, 45% of mothers said they felt uncomfortable feeding in front of others, and most acutely so in public spaces*.
Connecting Through Stories
by Lucila Newell, October 30th 2017 Connecting with others, sharing stories, finding a role model is crucial to breastfeeding. Because breastfeeding is … More
Building Belonging
The arguments for breastfeeding in terms of health are already won, but breastfeeding statistics remain impossibly low in the UK. How can this be? Because the barriers to breastfeeding are cultural, not medical but the majority of information about breastfeeding comes from the medical community. This viewpoint says that women should breastfeed, without acknowledging the personal and emotional struggles involved in doing so.
Fabrica Gallery Installation
Fabrica Gallery hosted Holding Time’s first multi-screen installation—mothers’ voices, animation, and music exploring breastfeeding, culture and time.