"(In) Fertile Embodiment: revealing the invisibility of infertility between the medical and maternal through feminist art practice"

AHRC funded Practice based PhD at Birmingham City University School of Art and Cultural Studies and De Montfort University Centre for Reproduction Research (2022-26):

MyPhD research is concerned with expanding understandings of (In)fertility beyond the medical. Linking language and corporeality, it explores embodied experiences that occur through contemporary, (“patient”-led) im/material online and digital encounters of infertility, to reveal emotional invisible stories and silent conversations. It draws on feminist notions of affectivity in "becoming" maternal within these self-care labours, queering time (its diseased chronicity), and fertile identities, though new alternative subjectivities. This mobilises the sensory through making with performative photography, data/text visualisation, and participatory bio-art methods, to investigate a narrative of creative care within Art & Health, building on historical feminist practice around lived experience.


How is infertility visualised and verbalised within contemporary online spaces, articulating new embodied infertile subjectivities?
How can art practice re-present narratives of creative care around the dis-eased female body through reimagining (in)fertile experience?

Supported using a full Doctoral research funding award by AHRC through Midlands 4 Cities.



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"Re.conceive"

Arts Council funded Research Project (2021-22):



This research-led project investigated the invisibility of Infertility within the new wave of maternal visual arts. Its aimed to explore and visually theorise the transformational process of becoming a (M)Other, challenging traditional reproduction to reconceive a sub-maternal. Its themes were focused on Embodiment - looking at embryonic/egg imaging, re-appropriating (male) science to question the commodification & mechanisation of the female body; and Identity – looking at the infertile female and its challenge to the feminine economy and normative motherhood within capitalist neo-liberal society.


The project ran for 12 months from March 2021 to March 2022 (although many collaborations continue).

Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.