Unvanishing
Here are some artworks I've made as part of the Arts Council Develop Your Creative Practice grant (Jan - Dec 2025) I was awarded to make visual art in tandem with the book I am currently writing, Lostling: a social history of stillbirth and the search for an invisible brother.
These pieces aim to 'unvanish' my baby brother, and his peers, stillborn in an era when hospital and funerary practices made these babies disappear. The works explore themes of absence, elegy, remembrance, and ongoingness.
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I am drawn to methods like cyanotype printing and casting which create traces or imprints of something only temporarily present and to methods associated with the 1960s, like tie-dye and the slide show. I like to use found objects, both natural and domestic. In my digital photography I am interested in framing as a psychological process and in the lens as a mediating eye.
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If you have any suggestions about opportunities for sharing these pieces more widely please do get in touch.
Absence
Stopped Time
Dandelion clocks suspended on wool thread
O is in Mother: my mother myself, mother's day, are you my mother, time is a mother
After A Conflict of Interest, Lauren McLaughlin, 2016
Photographic collage
Four Thousand Holes
Tie-dye on brush cotton sheet
The Shortest Story
Clay impression cast in Jesmonite
Hospital Signs
Cropped photographs
(dis)counted
Photo collage of extracts from the 1911 census, Ancestry
Counting
After Madge Gill's Face with Amber Eyes (undated)
Cyanotype of shasta daisies
Blue for a boy
Cyanotype of leaves: English oak, Turkey oak, water oak, willow oak. lime, small leaved lime, sycamore
Necklace for water child
Finger knitting and bound wooden hearts given to Mizuko Jizo statue, Crossbones cemetery for the outcast dead
Hospital visit: canteen, Look upon this little child, it did not light
Photo series
In the balance
Land art of stacked pebbles
Postmemory Box
Slide show video of family heirlooms
And yet, there were flowers
Meditations in Blue
Cyanotypes of daisies, shells, pins, honesty and feathers on Jacquard fabric
Perfect as seashells
After line in Nina Bogin's The Stillborn, 1989
Cares
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Light as an empty creel
After line in Seamus Heaney's Elegy for a Still Born Child, 1969
Messages
Remembrance
Patchwork
Photographic collage
small sharp field
Pin sculpture
The mourning dove was silenced
Impression in clay
Ongoingness
On transience
Cyanotype print
Did you dream?
Cyanotype print
Afterlife
Clay impression cast in Jesmonite
A Statue Appeared
Photograph of part of Damien Hirst's 2012 public artwork, Verity
A Courage
Cyanotype of cardigans and unravelled wool
Heaven
Cyanotype of a sky view using negative of photograph on acetate
Ephemeral
Land art of oyster shells below the tide line
Growing
Cyanotype of twigs
Barque
Cyanotype of celandine leaves made into a paper boat
Within the waters
Charcoal drawing