Metal: Fruitful Infertility: Artist Talk With Dr Rebecca Baillie

16 October 2014

6.30pm

Free

Dr Rebecca Baillie, artist and curator of MaMSIE (Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics), will reflect on Tabitha Moses’ new exhibition of work, Investment, in a talk expected to highlight the under-representation of experiences of miscarriage and infertility within art history. Dr Baillie will talk about Tabitha’s work in relation to pioneering female artists Frida Kahlo, Tracey Emin, Lorraine Clarke and photographers Elina Brotherus and Ana Casas Broda, who all share an interest in origin and loss. While providing an introduction to the common themes in the work of these female artists, Dr Baillie will focus on Tabitha Moses’ practice and the work currently on show at the Walker Art Gallery.

Dr Rebecca Baillie is an artist, freelance writer, curator and member of the network MaMSIE based at the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck University, London. MaMSIE creates spaces for interdisciplinary conversations about motherhood and the maternal more broadly. It draws together those working across different academic and artistic communities including feminism, psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality studies, the social sciences, philosophy, visual and performance art, literature, and creative writing. MaMSIE aims to open up and sustain critical debates about the maternal, and explore the unique site it occupies at the potent intersection between scientific possibilities, psychosocial practices and cultural representations. 

The event has been planned to coincide with Tabitha Moses’ current exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Investment. A continuation of the work presented at the Liverpool Art Prize 2013, Investment explores Tabitha’s experience of infertility and IVF. For the Walker exhibition she has created a series of portraits of patients from the Hewitt Fertility Centre with hand-embroidered hospital gowns which feature traditional and non-traditional symbols of fertility. Following conversations, research and the memories of her own experiences, she gathered information about the things people use to help them conceive and embroidered them, in colourful cotton and decorative line, onto the gowns worn during IVF treatment. Amongst other symbols and illustrations, the gowns feature mandalas of jewellery, a tattoo, fertility goddesses, and a pair of lucky knickers, alongside syringes and empty medical bottles. Dr Baillie will explore the different areas of Tabitha’s practice and open up the debate about representation of these issue within an art historical context.

The event will end with a shared vegetarian supper.