COVENTRY BIENNIAL 2021 - "Mothers Who Make: Infertility in the Arts"

Watch video of presentation here

An artist talk & discussion with Sally Butcher (Birmingham, UK) and heather michel riddle (Philadelphia, US) who in their own unique styles explore the invisibilities and silences of Infertility in (m)otherhood.

heather michel riddle (she/her) is a mother, artist and art therapist newly based outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (United States). She makes art to explore and challenge the place of her experience within a larger context – relating the intimate to the larger narrative in order to create a shift in collective norming. Her work is influenced and intertwined by the specific – surroundings, family, daily life – and the broad – mothering, reproductive justice/infertility, mental health and the historical portrayal of women. Often working in series, her practice ranges from painting to printmaking/collage.

Sally Butcher is an artist, lecturer and researcher based in Birmingham, UK. Her practice engages with feminist discourse on subjectivity, through an understanding of embodiment. She is drawn to questioning the visual languages used within conventional representations of female gendered identity, across spheres of the domestic, maternal, and erotic, working mostly through processes of photography, alternative printmaking and drawing. This has led to her current Arts Council funded research practice project, ‘Re.conceive: Investigating the Invisibility of Infertility in the New Wave of Maternal Visual Arts’, which seeks to challenge naturalised reproduction and reframe the narrative of normative motherhood with representations of the sub-maternal.