Overcoming the Cultural Barriers to Breastfeeding
The Bradford season of the Holding Time podcast brings together a diverse range of mothers’ stories about breastfeeding, adoption, pregnancy, free-birthing, donor milk, preterm babies and birth trauma. Co-created with mothers, local infant feeding teams and community partners, the series examines breastfeeding as part of the wider experience of motherhood and maternal wellbeing in Bradford.
The Holding Time Milk Line celebrates Bradford mothers through an immersive walking trail of art, poetry, and storytelling. Created by artist Lisa Creagh for Baby Week Bradford, the trail links Family Hubs and green spaces, inviting families to listen, reflect, and connect with local stories of motherhood, feeding, and wellbeing.
The Holding Timepiece is a long-term artwork by Lisa Creagh exploring maternal time as something that grows rather than simply passes. Developed from Cosmatesque geometry, glass, photography, 2D and 3D animation, the Timepiece has evolved into the centrepiece of a planned VR Creative Health intervention for mothers with babies in neonatal intensive care.
I’ve come to realise why it was hard at times in my breastfeeding journey and a lot of this relating to being neurodivergent. As we see an increase in awareness around hidden disabilities, I hope other mums can feel confident to seek help if they’re finding it hard to breastfeed/parent a child with additional needs.
Bradford will host a range of exciting Creative Health events as part of the Holding Time project, aimed at raising breastfeeding awareness ahead of City of Culture 2025.
Holding Time moves into the new Family Hub Network in Halton with creative writing workshops, portraits across seven venues and an audio tour around the beautiful walled garden at Norton Priory
Singing Mamas joined with the Holding Time Project Manchester mothers to create a warm afternoon of storytelling and chorus for the end of the writing workshops at Manchester Art Gallery.
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.
In 2018, Holding Time partnered with ONCA Gallery in Brighton to test the idea of a Breastfeeding Hub—a welcoming space for mothers’ voices, interviews, and conversations about the cultural and structural barriers to breastfeeding.
