"Visible Bodies" Artist Residency and Exhibition for Feed at Ikon Gallery (2024)

Artist-in-residence for Feed, at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham UK, organised in collaboration with Birmingham City Council and In Certain Places.



As part of Feed, an arts-based project that promotes inclusive, sustainable approaches to infant feeding and public space, Ikon hosted Feeding Chair, a collaborative artwork which invites parents and carers to body or bottle feed their babies and young children in galleries and other public venues. Featuring artwork by artist Jade Montserrat, the chair integrates audio works and videos from.

My artist residency responded to Feed’s themes of gender, care and the space of the reproductive and maternal body, through the lens of my own practice-based research about experiences of infertility. Referencing my doctoral research on “(In)fertile Embodiment”, I was interested in creating conversations across the reproductive body, placing the woman’s (in)fertile body in dialogue with a feeding maternal one, speaking not to but through women’s bodies, amplifying the silences that have been enforced upon both these women within institutionalised structures, and re-presenting their invisibilities as they are both absented from public space, to explore their disruptive material re-presentation.


I was particularly drawn to the use of women’s stories that had inspire the chair’s making, the maternal soundscapes that came through the speakers around the body in the feeding space and the fragmented text that adorned the outside. Pursuing this interest in sharing lived experience, I created work using women’s words around (in)fertility not as a story-telling project, but creating pieces that brought these women’s accounts together creatively in a collective telling. I wanted to explore how these bodies can share a public performance space, for reproductive women at every stage are frequently told to be quiet and so hide the visceral trauma in our bodies. How they start to visibly hold each other in this space, re-read their scripted roles, and communicate the unspoken?

The practice developed included many performative text and sound pieces, including some early augmented reality works, which re-presented the invisibilities and amplified the silences that have been enforced upon these women’s bodies within institutionalised structures.

Residency: 5 June – 7 July 2024 | Exhibition: 7-28 July 2024

Feeding Chair is supported by Birmingham City Council Public Health, Arts Council of England and University of Central Lancashire.