"What if birth, long shrouded and parodied by popular culture, was made visible? What if a comfortable and dynamic language existed to describe it? What if, in picturing the process so many times over and insisting on its very subjectivity, we understood childbirth and its representation to be a political act?” -Carmen Winant

On May 31, 2021, after 20 hours of excruciating labour, I gave birth to my son alone in an operating room full of caped doctors, cold metal equipment, and fluorescent lights. I was immobile on a table on my back, arms out, unable to see what was happening to me, the birth of my son. I couldn’t hold him after he was born. He was scurried away and out of view, wiped dry, and then presented to me wrapped in a sheet. Only our cheeks could touch. From another room down the hall, my husband watched from his phone screen. He took as many screenshots as he could, which later became the only real memory I have of the whole experience. After being discharged, I visited the emergency room twice within 7 days due to extreme swelling in my limbs and abdominal pain. Each time I was told this was “normal”. The recovery was painful and long.

In the weeks and months following Henry’s unplanned, emergency C-section (during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic), making photographs helped me begin to process the trauma we all experienced. I’ve named this body of work Failure to Progress. The title comes directly from my hospital birth report. “Failure to progress” is a medical term that means labour has taken too long.

Two and a half years later, on November 13, 2023, I welcomed my second child, a baby girl, via VBAC, vaginal birth after cesarean. The experience was transformative. My husband and doula held me while I laboured mostly at home, in the quiet of our bedroom, with a candle burning. Maya was immediately handed to me after she was born. I smelled her wet hair and touched her fresh skin. This little person, the new love of my life. I sat up on my own in the hospital bed so she could breastfeed. I asked my midwife to show me her placenta - the organ my body grew. I felt supported and cared for. That night the three of us slept in our own bed at home. I recovered quickly and without complications.

Maya’s birth experience healed the trauma I carried from my first birth. It has given me a unique lens on which I’ve relied to create this body of work. As an Artist in Residence at the School of Photographic Arts (Jan-June 2024) I explored my archive of photographic material to compare the births. The images included here are a mix of found family photographs, self portraits, and cell phone screenshots chronicling a difficult, painful, joyous, and redemptive four years of matrescence. 

Using a variety of digital and analogue processes, collage and textiles, this work aims to engage the public in an important conversation about inhumane pandemic protocols, the over-medicalization of birth in our current system, and the negative impact of inaccurate, sexist medical terminology.

“Imagine the mother gorilla giving birth and you try to pick up her newborn baby. And then you will understand what a maternal protective aggressive instinct is. In our civilization we have suppressed that instinct for a long time. Suppression of innate knowledge is one of medicine’s unfortunate tendencies.”

Relics depicts a number of local botanicals from the Ottawa area that the artist has sourced, dried and photographed. These chine collé prints, printed on Japanese washi paper, are an ode to the German photographer and sculptor, Karl Blossfeldt. The sculptural rigidity of the floral stems are juxtaposed with the soft texture of the Washi paper, articulating the tension between the artist’s increasingly rigid body and the comfort and softness she seeks.