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Open Eye Gallery Interview

Women are constantly faced with this difficult choice. And it is often a woman’s choice whether they want to carry on with their career and keep climbing the ladder and earning more and getting what they deserve, or whether they want to prioritise their children. There’s just this constant juggle of yourself over your child. I feel like I do prioritise myself a lot. I’ve been very selfish in many ways to continue with this work. The unselfish thing perhaps, would have been to go and get a job.

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.

Bonding

A baby’s brain is constantly making new pathways. 250,000 neurons are formed per minute in a fetal brain throughout pregnancy and that proliferation, migration, differentiation, synaptogenesis continue into the toddler years and pruning of these until puberty. Each baby’s personality, body, brain and trans generational inheritance is of course unique and dependent upon their DNA, yet their experiences and exposure to the world around them throughout pregnancy and in early life also all have an effect on them.

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.

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”.

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.