Category: Losing a Twin at Birth

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Memory Studies

Rose petals in water in three jam jars
Photo credit: Kate Sweeney, 2022.

In a previous post, I have written about the inclusion of Where We Will Go in the ‘Communities and Change’ exhibition, hosted by Newcastle Contemporary Art as part of the 2023 Memory Studies Association conference. The Memory Studies journal has recently published a special issue related to the conference and, in one of the articles, organisers Catherine Gilbert and Alison Atkinson-Phillips reflect on the various works that were displayed in the exhibition.

Catherine and Alison note that, in curating the exhibition, there was a strong desire to embed the conference in place and to connect with local communities. They observe that there was a particular poignancy to the inclusion of the Amber Collective in the exhibition, because the Side Gallery – their permanent exhibition space in Newcastle – had recently closed due to a lack of funds. Special screenings of two Amber films documented the long history of industrial loss on Tyneside and its impact on local communities. The short film from our project was connected to place through the activity of walking, and it was positioned in the gallery so that it was in conversation with Henna Asikainen’s ecological installation Delicate Shuttle. Asikainen had walked with people who had experienced migration and displacement, and they had gathered white poplar leaves which were dispersed across a large white wall of the gallery space. Similarly, Kate had invited the parents participating in our project to walk in a place that was meaningful to them, and gather materials that could be used as the basis for the inks. The act of gathering materials and transforming them into another form is a powerful one, and the white poplar leaves reminded me of the rose petals that the parents brought into the workshop, so carefully assembled and preserved. These materials are fragile, even when they have been preserved, and as Catherine and Alison note, they can speak as much of the dispersal of memory as of its conservation in the archive.

Leaves and petals connect human memories with the more-than-human, reminding us that acts of memory are as much expressions of ecological as cultural community. The question of community was at the heart of the exhibition and many of the installations considered different scales of community. Kate’s film was one of the most intimate communities represented in the exhibition, working as it did at the scale of the family. I have documented in previous posts our encounter, in the course of the project, with the ways in which the loss of a twin at birth resonates across multiple generations of a family as well as rippling out to affect friendship networks. This experience of complex grief is difficult to speak about, and, like the other artworks displayed, Kate’s short film demonstrated that words are not the only way to convey grief. The gathering of materials and making of the inks formed an important act of memorialisation in itself, and the drawings that the parents and the siblings made with the inks provided a further testament to their loss.

One of the key questions raised by the staging of the exhibition was the place of creative-critical works within a discipline such as memory studies, which has predominantly focused on the traditional academic outputs of the article and the monograph. Catherine and Alison open their article by reflecting on exactly this question:

The imaginative, and often speculative, approaches afforded by creative inquiry enable creative practitioners to interpret memory in material and embodied ways that are not always easily translated into traditional journal articles. As a community of scholars, it is important that Memory Studies takes this kind of creative-critical inquiry seriously as contributions to the field – not (only) as objects of study from which meanings are extracted and interpreted as a quest to produce knowledge, but as alternative forms of research ‘output’, producing and displaying knowledge on and in its own terms. (p. 354)

These are important questions for the field to address. How can memory studies become more inclusive of creative practice, when it is premised on particular forms and modes of publication and dissemination? What does it mean to value process as well as ‘output’? Which aspects of memory might most effectively be opened up through creative practice? It is becoming more common to see creative exhibitions or performances staged alongside academic conferences and this is a welcome development. At the same time, such creative responses are often not fully integrated into the conference programme, featuring instead as a venue for mingling over lunch or at a wine reception, and/or as a space to visit for reflection between sessions. A final question, then, might be: How could the conference format, as a key expression of the academic community of a field, evolve to become more inclusive of creative-critical practice contributions?

With many thanks to Catherine and Alison for curating the exhibition and writing an article that enabled creative-critical practice to feature in the special issue of Memory Studies.

References

Alison Atkinson-Phillips and Catherine Gilbert, ‘Creatively imagining communities: The Communities and Change exhibition’, Memory Studies 18.2 (2025), pp. 354-62. You can access the article here.

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Inks from donated flowers

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

At the Spontaneous Memorials conference at Manchester University a week ago, I was intrigued to hear of an art project that used inks made from the donated flowers that had been left at a spontaneous memorial. Our project used inks made from materials that the parents had gathered from places that were meaningful to them in the context of their grief, and the project that I learned about shared a similar ethos of imbuing the very materials from which the images were made with affective and emotional meaning.

The paper that I listened to was presented by Shannon Blamyres, Curator of Manuscripts at the Alexander Turnbull Library (National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa) and Stephanie Gibson, Curator of New Zealand Histories and Cultures at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand. The paper was titled, ‘Beyond the First Wave: Understanding the Ebb and Flow of Trauma Collection’.

On 15 March 2019, a man carrying semi-automatic weapons entered the Masjid Al-Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand. The gunman killed 51 people and injured another 40. In an instant outpouring of grief, shock and anger spontaneous memorials formed near the sites of the attacks and throughout the rest of the country.  Thousands of people visited these sites and left behind artworks, flowers, candles, toys, cards, placards and banners.

Gibson and Blaymires have already written of the work of their two Wellington-based institutions to sensitively document and archive this physical and digital outpouring of national grief, as evidence of what they called the nation’s ‘first wave’ response to the attacks. More specifically, the Alexander Turnbull Library and the Museum of New Zealand (Te Papa) were also invited by Muslim leaders to acquire the hundreds of community tributes that had been left outside the Kilburnie Mosque in the Wellington Islamic Centre.

In the weeks and months following the attacks, staff documented the cityscape in unobtrusive ways, photographing public tributes and vigils and collecting online material in the public domain. No intervention was initially made with the public tributes around the city beyond this recording activity. These collecting activities captured the immediate response and much of what was recorded has either been removed or is no longer visible.

With the Kilburnie Mosque tributes, an early decision was made by Te Papa and the Alexander Turnbull Library to acquire the tributes in their totality to maintain archival integrity. Deselection of items was seen to work against the life force (mauri) of the collection, as well as risking arbitrariness and implying a hierarchy of grief. The approach taken was community driven and curatorially responsible and preserved the representation of voices, faith, community, and forms in response to the event.

In their paper at the conference, Gibson and Blaymires observed that while a growing body of work exists on the immediate collection of materials from spontaneous memorials, there is a significant gap of knowledge relating to the life of these collections after they have been gathered. What does ongoing community engagement with trauma material look like? What roles do the materials play in commemoration, education and healing? And how do institutions ensure that these materials remain active for future generations? What, in other words, does a ‘second wave’ of archiving spontaneous memorials look like?

Of particular interest in the context of the ink-making at the heart of our ‘Losing a Twin at Birth’ project was the Darkness Into Light initiative at the Turanga Christchurch City Libraries, led by community artist Janneth Gil. Under the umbrella of Darkness Into Light, Gil ran the ‘Raising Sakinah: Finding Peace’ initiative, working with women who had lost loved ones in the attacks. ‘Sakinah’ is an Arabic word meaning spirituality, or the peace and consolation of the divine presence, and participants in the workshops responded to this prompt to explore where, or in what, they had found sakinah. Workshops guided them through photography and printmaking techniques, so that the women could produce their own artworks.  

Many of the women used photographs of the loved ones they had lost, trees, or the Quran, to express what gave them peace. From these, they made linocut prints using inks made by Gil from the cremated ashes of the floral tributes that had been left at the spontaneous memorials at the Christchurch Botanic Gardens and outside Al Noor Mosque. The idea of making this ink came to Gil when she saw the scale of the flowers that had been left, and Rebecca Parnham, who helped to run the workshops and provided a safe and supportive space for the women, collected the floral tributes for the artist. The ash from the burned flowers provided black, the burned wrapping paper made grey, and the copper florist’s wire provided an intense blue green. Charcoal was also made by burning organic materials donated after the attacks in temperatures above 400C in an oxygen starved environment. Through the use of these hand-made materials, the artworks mixed the women’s grief with the outpouring of community feeling and love.

Alongside the exhibition of the works at the Turanga Christchurch City Library, which coincided with the fourth anniversary of the attacks, Gil also led a Finding Peace badge-making workshop. Here, members of the public wrote messages of peace and made them into a badge, using paper from the thousands of origami cranes left as tributes to the victims of the mosque attacks.  Here, too, donated items were repurposed in meaningful ways, to be given back to the community who had donated them in order to amplify and reinforce their message.

Speaking after the paper to the conference organiser, Kostas Arvanitis, he observed that the artistic transformation or repurposing of donated tributes is common to a ‘second wave’ of memorialisation, where there is often uncertainty as to what to do with some of the objects in the longer term and an understandable reluctance to discard them.  Kostas cited the example of the Manchester bombings archive, which is held by Manchester Art Gallery; there, candles that had been left as tributes were melted down and reworked by an artist into new memorial candles, which were then given to the families of those who had lost loved ones in the attacks.

The paper highlighted to me the ways in which archiving spontaneous memorials can, with the support of a community artist, offer ongoing support for those who have lost loved ones through the sensitive and creative repurposing of appropriate materials. It also focused my attention once again on the powerful memorial function of hand-making inks from materials with strong affective resonance, such that the colour, texture, and saturation of the inks become as vital as the image, to the meaning of the artwork that is created from them.

Further reading:

Stephanie Gibson and Shannon Blaymires, ‘First Wave Collecting – Christchurch Terror Attacks, 15 March 2019’, The Curator: The Museum Journal 66.2 (2023), pp. 233-55. DOI: 10.111/cura.12451    

Previous Tūranga Exhibitions | Christchurch City Libraries Ngā Kete Wānanga o Ōtautahi

Light in the Darkness: Transforming tragedy through creativity | Christchurch City Libraries Ngā Kete Wānanga o Ōtautahi    

Women who lost loved ones in mosque attacks create art exhibition to help journey through grief | Stuff

The Panel: Raising Sakinah, Finding Peace exhibition | RNZ

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World Health Day 2025

child's drawing of dolphin in sea
Film still, Where We Will Go (2023) by Kate Sweeney

Yesterday marked World Health Day, which this year marks the start of a global campaign focused on improving maternal and newborn health. To mark this initiative, Newcastle University published a blog that profiled the leading research in this area that is being carried out at Newcastle.

It was a privilege to see Where Will We Go featured in the blog alongside medical research advances, and to see Judith Rankin’s wider research in this area recognised and celebrated. Our project sought to create a supportive resource for parents who lose a twin at birth, so that they could hear the voices and experiences of the families we worked with. It was very special to hear from the parents who participated in the project that they would use the film to speak with their children about their lost siblings when the time was right to do so.

You can read the blog post about the work in newborn and maternal health at Newcastle University here.

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Birth Rites Collection

Marie Brett, ‘Anamnesis’, Cork: Crawford Art Gallery, 2013.

Last week the Newcastle University Medical Humanities Network hosted Helen Knowles to speak about the Birth Rites Collection. An artist and curator, Knowles built up the Collection, which is the only collection of contemporary artwork dedicated to the subject of childbirth. Founded in 2009 and currently housed at the University of Kent, the Collection was formerly held at King’s College, London.

Knowles spoke about the history of the Collection, which seeks to encourage debate and increase awareness of practices of childbirth. She addressed questions of curation, and of the display of artworks that represent sensitive subject matter. She then presented a virtual tour of the Collection, highlighting and discussing a number of its key works.

The first artwork on the tour concerned the subject of baby loss. Bella Milroy’s Sharing the Gift From Elanor addressed the artist’s relationship with her older sister, who died shortly after birth. The work comprises a photograph taken on the hospital ward just after Elanor’s birth. Beneath this photograph is a reproduction of the same image, made by Milroy nearly thirty years later. The two images ask us to register the differences between them. The photograph captures those who were present to witness Elanor’s brief life, and provokes remembrance for those who were there. The reproduction emphasizes that Milroy’s access to the scene is secondary, and that she can only imagine rather than remember her sister.

Helen Knowles and Francesca Granato, ‘Conception’, 2008. Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

Other pieces in the Collection that address baby loss acted as key reference points for our own project. Knowles’ work is represented in the Collection through the printed wallpaper, Conception. From a distance, the pattern looks like an art-nouveau design, but close up it becomes apparent that it depicts scientific details of the reproductive organs. The wallpaper was on display at the Whitworth Art Gallery’s exhibition Still Parents: Life After Baby Loss, which was showing when we worked on the project, and which both Kate and I visited. Every aspect of the exhibition, from curation to interpretation, had been informed by the project participants; namely, parents who had experienced the loss of a baby during pregnancy or just after birth.

Working with professional artists, the Still Parents project encouraged participants to explore their experiences through creativity. Memory boxes displayed around the walls contained intimate objects that were associated with the loss.

Photo Credit: Anne Whitehead

It was moving to see how these objects were transformed across different media. This pair of shoes was worked into clay and fired as decoration on a pot.

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

The shoes were etched onto paper.

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

They were embroidered onto cloth.

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

And they became part of a wallpaper pattern, combined with a little woolly hat from a different memory box.

Photo Credit: Anne Whitehead

Although our project worked with materials that were more indirectly associated with the loss, the transformation of those materials into ink, drawings, and the digital medium of film was based in the same process of enabling parents to explore their grief through creativity.

Marie Brett’s Anamnesis: The Amulet also forms part of the Birth Rites Collection. Developed in partnership with three Irish maternity hospitals, Brett’s project explored the amulet as an object that holds particular resonance in the context of pregnancy and infant loss. The exhibition displayed ten photographs of mementoes connected to lost infants, which were matched with audio clips of the parents speaking. The Collection holds the tables on which the photographs were displayed, the framed prints, and the CDs and headphone sets.

The words of the parents were very personal (see the pages from the exhibition catalogue, at the head of this post), yet Brett’s decision to place them in conversation with one another was suggestive of the power of objects in the context of grief. Many of the mementoes were kept in a safe space at home and brought out for private rituals of remembrance. In the Irish context, the public display of images of these objects challenged long-standing cultural taboos about infant death. I have written in previous posts about the cillini, clandestine burial sites across Ireland where babies’ bodies were buried in secrecy, often at night. The project’s sharing of stories offers parents the opportunities to talk about their children, and opens up a public conversation around their denied memories.

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

As I type these words, I have on the desk in front of me the publicity flyer and catalogue for Brett’s exhibition, which were given to me by Judith Rankin when we first discussed collaborating on our project. Although we were not working in the cultural context of Ireland, the experience of losing a twin at birth still remains largely silent in the broader conversation around pregnancy and infant loss.

It was wonderful to learn from Helen about the Birth Rites Collection, as well as to encounter both new and familiar artworks that chimed with our project on baby loss.

Many thanks to Olivia Turner for organizing the workshop, and to the Newcastle University Institutes of Humanities and Arts Practice for supporting the event.

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Honouring its Telling

Film still, Where We Will Go (2023) by Kate Sweeney

I am delighted that a special issue of the journal Literature and Medicine on the representation of pain has just been published. Edited by Sara Wasson, the focus of the volume lies not in the claim that pain is unspeakable, but rather in its varied cultural legibility – the ways in which existing cultural contexts and expectations influence what can be heard of pain’s particular stories.

My own essay in the volume looks at two poetry collections by mothers who have lost their babies – Rebecca Goss’s Her Birth (2013) and Karen McCarthy Woolf’s An Aviary of Small Birds (2014). Their experiences of loss are different: Goss lost her daughter, Ella, from an incurable heart condition at sixteen months, while McCarthy Woolf lost her son Otto at birth. In their haunting collections, both poets nevertheless adapt the form of the lyric elegy to express the pain of maternal grief. This form invites its readers to inhabit and linger in the singular moments that the poems commemorate, rather than reading towards a recovery. Both poets also address the ways in which cultural expectations of pregnancy and motherhood exacerbate the pain of grieving for a baby, because they make it difficult for the experience to be heard.

I wrote this essay as I was preparing to work with the parents who had experienced baby loss from a multiple pregnancy. As we talked with the parents in the workshop sessions, I could glimpse threads of connection between the work Kate was developing with them in the film and the poems I had been reading. The poets attend carefully to the shaping of the words on the page, and this found its echo in the parents’ drawings, using the inks that Kate had made. Their careful tracing out on paper of the names of their lost babies gave weight and form to their loss, making it tangible and constituting its own kind of poetry. The question of how to move forward from the loss also resonated across the poems and the film. The parents’ articulation of what it means to live as a family beside the lost twin echoed the closing poems of Goss’s collection, which explore how she shares with her second daughter the ongoing presence of her older sister, who died before she was born. The poets emphasise that the pain of losing a baby is heightened by the cultural illegibility of baby loss; for the parents, the complex grief of losing one twin while another survived rendered their experience particularly challenging to tell and to be heard.

Thanks to Sara for her commitment to the special issue on pain, and for her meticulous care in bringing the essays to publication. It’s been wonderful to be a part of this project.

You can read a version of the essay here.

References

Sara Wasson, ‘Pain’s Plurals and Narrative Disruption: Communicating Pain and Honouring its Telling’, Literature and Medicine 41.2 (2023). The article can be accessed here.

Anne Whitehead, ‘”Your Tiny White Vests, Unworn”: Contemporary Elegies of Maternal Loss’, Literature and Medicine 41.2 (2023), pp. 372-90.

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Hands

Cupped hands holding rose petals
Film still, ‘Where We Will Go’ (2023) by Kate Sweeney

Last week, Judith and I travelled through to Sunderland University at the invitation of Tom Fairfax to speak about the twin loss project to second-year medical students, as part of the fourth Humanities in Medicine Symposium. It was wonderful to see so many medical students there, and to participate in such a thoughtful exploration of the intersections between medicine and the humanities.

As I listened to the other speakers at the event, I found myself reflecting on hands. The first speaker, Jonathan Coates, is a general practitioner in the east end of Newcastle and a research fellow at the Durham Institute for Medical Humanities. Outlining how his medical practice had come to embrace the humanities, Jonathan explained to the students that he had taken an optional module in Medical Photography during his undergraduate degree in Medicine, which had given him a starting point to which he had later returned. Jonathan’s chosen topic for his photography project was bereavement, and on his powerpoint slide he showed a photograph he had taken of a woman’s hands for his portfolio, which comprised a quiet yet eloquent portrait of grief.

Emmanuel Oladipo, Lecturer in Clinical Communication at Manchester University, talked to the students about his own spoken-word poetry in the context of medical training. As I watched him speak and perform his poetry, I reflected on the power of gesture to convey meaning. Performance poetry can amplify and elaborate on the interaction between word and gesture in everyday communication, emphasising that gesture sometimes reinforces what is spoken, and at other times contradicts it.

Artist Kate Stobbart has long had an interest in hand movement and gesture. Her work included video pieces in which only her hands were visible, performing gestures that have accompanied the words of others – televised speeches, for example. With the words taken away, these works ask us to think about the eloquence, if not the poetry, of hand gesture. As a practicing doctor, Kate engaged the students in conversation about how her artistic attention to non-verbal communication might also feed into the consulting room.

Watching our own film with the students, I found myself attending to the different hands that appear in the work. Hands are important to Kate Sweeney, the commissioned artist on the project, and part of the ritual that accompanied parents bringing materials into the workshops involved her photographing their hands holding what they had gathered. One of these photographs was integrated into the film, and depicts a parent holding rose petals. The photograph reminded me of Jonathan’s study of hands, in that both comprised intimate portrayals of grief. In Kate’s photograph, the tenderness and protective care with which the parent’s hands hold the fragile petals is evident. The petals had been gathered by the baby’s grandparents and when I look at this image, I also see their hands, carefully picking and sorting the petals so that they can be included in the project.

Child's hand holding an object found on the beach
Film still, ‘Where We Will Go’ (2023) by Kate Sweeney

A child’s hands appear in the video sections of the film where the walks are depicted. These hands represent the involvement of the siblings in choosing and gathering the materials. The hands are exploratory – playful, even – as they test out the qualities of what they have found, and they give us a different orientation to loss. They remind us that the parental perspective sits alongside other frameworks of understanding and modes of communication.

Hand washing a crab claw in a sink
Film still, ‘Where We Will Go’ (2023) by Kate Sweeney

The artist’s hands appear in those video sections of the film which document Kate’s making of the inks. These hands are active and doing – washing and sorting materials, grinding crab shell into powder, or pouring distilled liquid through paper filters. Juxtaposed with the hands of the parents and children collecting materials, we can see the co-creative process that is embedded at the heart of our project, as different hands perform the varied tasks and processes that are needed for the inks to be made.

Doodles in ink on paper
Film still, ‘Where We Will Go’ (2023) by Kate Sweeney

This principle of co-creation is also evident in the various drawings that we see in the film, which were made either on the walks or in the workshops. In the image that closes the film, Kate overlaid the parents’ experiments with their inks in the workshops; each of them have inscribed the name of their lost baby. The ink drawings in the film gesture towards the hands that have made them, and they mark the trace of where these hands have been.

I extend my thanks to Tom, and to the other speakers, for such a rich and cohesive symposium, inviting us to think with the students about what the arts, humanities and social sciences might bring to medical training and practice. Watching the film in this context gave me a fresh perspective on the rich and varied vocabulary of hands that threads through and across the work.

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Bottled Up

Rose petals in water in three jam jars
Photo credit: Kate Sweeney, 2022.

Making inks was at the core of the film that we co-created with parents who had experienced the loss of one twin from a multiple pregnancy. Workshop sessions were structured around the three stages of the ink-making process, as outlined by Jason Logan in Make Ink: (1) find ink (gathering the materials); (2) make ink (creating and bottling the inks); and (3) test ink (drawing and writing with the inks). The natural materials collected either on the walks or in other meaningful places – bilberries, buttercups, rose petals, an empty crab shell – were distilled into inks, which were in turn transformed into drawings and film animations. The memories of the lost babies permeated these activities, and ink making became its own ritual of commemoration.

The parents spoke often during the making of the film about the bottling up or repression of a grief that could not easily be articulated, because it is not well understood. Outside the family, the loss often went unspoken and even within the family it was hard to share, particularly across the generations. The inks gave a new and different resonance to what it meant to bottle up feelings associated with the loss. One parent observed: ‘having those gorgeous little bottles – bottled up feelings and emotions and places – it’s a really nice thing to have at the end of the project. The bottles are sitting on the shelf so we know that any time we want to we can go back and use those again and we know that if we see other things that we like we can make more inks. Even for anniversaries or things like that we know we can do that.’ The ‘bottling up’ of the feelings and places associated with the walks as inks created new memories, and grief was experienced not as internal, but as an object on the shelf that could be picked up and put down, used and remade.

The parents talked about the beneficial process of gathering materials on the walks, which gave dedicated time as a family to remember, and provided them with an activity on which to focus: ‘I think as an actual process, it’s a wonderful therapy tool – I’m not sure if that’s the right phrase – just to be able to spend some time somewhere that you like thinking about the loss and then having something practical to do. We are going somewhere that we enjoy being and we want to collect these materials and we are going to turn them into something completely different. It might have started out as buttercups or crab shells, but it ends up being this beautiful film.’ The transformation of the materials into something different – and something beautiful – is key to the project’s meaning for the parents.

Kate made inks in her studio from the materials gathered on the walks, and she also gave kits and instructions to the parents so that they could make their own inks, either between sessions or once the sessions had ended. One parent commented of this aspect of the project: ‘It was easy to make the inks and we did our own from the instructions and equipment that Kate gave us. I think this was something that could be given to all sorts of families and not just families that have lost a child but anybody who has lost anyone.’ While the families appreciated the creativity of what could be done with the inks – the drawing and writing that they enabled – the ink making itself seemed to be particularly helpful for navigating grief as a family, and the bottled ink was treasured in and of itself.

Babs Behan, founder of Botanical Inks, has written of ink making from natural materials:

There is something simple and beautiful about walking out onto the land and picking up fallen leaves, harvesting flowers and berries, and digging up muddy roots and then soaking them in water to extract their colour. I have seen people falling in love over and over again with these old-new ways of creating something – they love the fact that bringing more beauty into the world needn’t be harmful to the environment or to their own personal health. (p. 10)

In the context of our project, making inks transformed the bottling up of feelings about a difficult form of grief into a positive meaning and activity, and provided beautiful objects that the parents could keep once the project had finished. Like Behan, we also watched the parents fall in love with the techniques and processes of ink making that Kate introduced to them in the workshop sessions.

References

Babs Behan, Botanical Inks: Plant-to-Print Dyes, Techniques and Projects (London: Quadrille, 2018).

Jason Logan, Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking (New York: Abrams, 2018).  

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Sensitive subjects

split screen photographs of hands letting go of thistledown against background of hills
Film still, Where We Will Go (2023) by Kate Sweeney

To mark Baby Loss Awareness Week (9-15 October), I am posting the text of a talk I recently gave at a half-day event focusing on sensitive subjects. Organized by Olivia Turner at Newcastle University, the workshop explored ethics and sensitive subject matters in creative practice.

Working with Lived Experience of Losing a Baby from a Multiple Pregnancy

The film Where We Will Go emerged out of a year-long practice of engagement with two families who had lost one twin from a multiple pregnancy at or before birth. The project team was me, Judith Rankin from the Faculty of Medicine, Nicholas Embleton from the Neonatal intensive Care Unit at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, and the charity Tiny Lives. We commissioned artist-researcher Kate Sweeney as the creative practitioner on the project.

The first phase of the project worked individually with parents, and Kate invited them to go on a ‘memory walk’ in a place that was meaningful for them and gather materials from which inks would be made. These inks were then given back to the parents, and the families drew and wrote with them – Kate has animated these images in the film, alongside footage of the places the parents went. In the project’s second phase the parents were brought together for the making of the film. Attention turned to the text of the film, which Kate compiled from conversations with the parents, as well as to the sound recording of the voices, and reviewing edits of the film together.

In this presentation, I focus on two aspects of the project that resonate with the theme of sensitive subjects. First, I think about the practice of working with a lived experience that the parents still sometimes struggled to think about. Secondly, I reflect on the importance to the film not of twinning but of triangulation.

First, then, the practice of representing a subject that was profoundly sensitive to the parents who participated in the project. They wanted the film to represent their experience, both as a resource for other parents and as a vehicle for talking to their children about their missing twin, or sibling, either now or in the future. But they also did not want to make a film that they would find difficult to watch – they wanted parents experiencing this form of loss to watch the film and be comforted by how other parents had navigated it, so that they would have hope. One mother observed: ‘I’d like the film to be able to help others in those initial days, so that they know it does improve. That you can live beside it. We all move together alongside her.’ The process of making the inks sought to base the project in an activity: the parents were doing and could say as little or as much around that as they wished. The activity was slow and structured, and the parents chose to involve their children and their own parents in the gathering of the materials.

What was striking was the extent to which, in talking about the inks and their making, the parents were able to speak of their loss, and perhaps more powerfully so than in addressing the death head on. Kate spoke of the process of making inks as one that held its own poetic vocabulary of grief. For example, the darkening of the ink as the materials react to the mordant is called a saddening. We thought about the inks as infused with the materials and with their associations.  The rose inks were made from petals gathered from the rosebush planted in remembrance of the lost twin in her grandparent’s garden and the fragrance of the ink prompted a wish for the baby’s memory to infuse the heart of the person who opened the bottle, the scent meaning that they too could learn her ‘by heart’. Gathered by the twin’s grandparents, the petals were sorted and sent to her parents in the post, the activity a means of familial connection and itself communicative of hopes that they (she) would survive the journey. Describing the act of making a painted butterfly with her eldest daughter, another mother observed: ‘You put it together and see how it’s separated out, with the inks pulling through’.  She then described the responses of her two children to the loss of their sister: ‘Her twin brother doesn’t even know what he’s lost. Her sister feels the loss more because she wanted a little sister. But she would have been more left out if she was here.’ The act of separating out and the inks pulling through bleeds into an articulation of how the baby’s memory diffuses differentially through her sibling and co-twin.

The memorialisation of babies lost at or around birth tends toward the metonymic register. The cast of a footprint is powerful because it is a part of the whole, it stands for what is missing. The inks tend more toward the metaphoric register – they enable creativity because they can be infused with any material that holds an association with the loss.  The water is a carrier – of the material but also of the associations with which it is invested. In the Buddhist tradition, children who die are ‘mizuko’, which translates as children of the water. The making of the inks resonated with and formalised the mourning rituals in memory of the parents’ own unborn, or born too soon, children.  

In making the film, we were aware that at its heart were two twins who had not survived birth. We were working with two families, first one to one and then together. There were two memory walks – one to a beach and one in the hills. The film was structured around twinning of different kinds, and Kate used the split screen of the film to amplify this motif of the double or twin.

Reflecting on the film, I am struck though by the importance of the structure of triangulation. Every session that we held with the parents involved both me and Kate Sweeney as facilitators. For the most part, Kate led the session, and I was in the role of witness, noting down key words and phrases that then formed the basis of the film text. Sometimes I asked for elaboration of a point, or asked questions and gave prompts. I kept my own sketchbook-journal that recorded and reflected on each session in the following days. After each session, Kate and I scheduled half an hour to talk about what had been shared with us and to record some preliminary thoughts.

In terms of process, it seems to me that the triangulation was vital in terms of the sensitivity of the subject matter. It meant that the therapeutic connotations of the one-to-one relation were disrupted. For a form of grief that has not been recognised and that has felt unheard outside of the family group, the witness-function of the third person in the room seemed important to the parents.  The sessions offered them a space away from work and family where they could take time to reflect and to create positive new memories in relation to the loss. One parent noted: ‘With a baby to look after, there wasn’t time then to process the loss properly. The sessions provide a mental space and you and Kate are open and listening. There are no interruptions. The memories are so few and the focus is around the funeral. The project is giving us prompts to create new memories and associations.’ The triangulation enabled the project team to hold the difficult memories between and across the sessions and to shape the film in response to them.

What then is to be summed up from these reflections? The main point I want to pull out of these threads is the value of indirection in relation to sensitive subjects, of coming at things at a slant. One the one hand, the process of making and talking about the inks embedded indirection into the project’s process, making them a carrier of meaning, loss and hope. On the other hand, indirection was achieved through embedding into the conversations a witness, who is an explicitly reflective and recording presence. The ethics of the project then lie not only in enabling the parents to speak of this underacknowledged form of grief, but also in enacting and reinforcing the act of listening, so the parents also knew that they had been heard.             

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Exhibition

hand in water with grasses
Film still, Where We Will Go (2023) by Kate Sweeney

The Losing a Twin at Birth project film was recently exhibited at the Newcastle Contemporary Art Gallery.

Kate’s film, Where We Will Go, was included in the exhibition Communities and Change, which ran from 3-7 July 2023. Curated by the organising committee of the Memory Studies Association seventh international conference, the exhibition brought together installations by local and international artists exploring the role of memory in communities navigating change.

Other participating artists included the Amber Collective, Henna Askainen, I-Wei Wu, Pablo Martinez Capdevila and Tara Hipwood.

Thanks are extended to Catherine Gilbert and Alison Atkinson-Phillips for their kind invitation to participate.

You can read more about the exhibition here.

        

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Engagement and Place Award

Newcastle University Engagement and Place award 2023, glasswork by Robyn Hare
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead.

The project team for Losing a Twin at Birth were delighted to be the recipients of a 2023 Newcastle University Engagement and Place Award.

The awards were established to recognise and celebrate great examples of collaboration beyond the university. They showcase teaching and research that brings value to the social, cultural, or economic wellbeing of a place, whether that is the city of Newcastle, the broader region, or across the globe.

Our project was the winner under the category of ‘Engaging for Health, Wellbeing and Societal Benefit.’

We received the award at a ceremony hosted in the Common Room at the Mining Institute in Newcastle. Newcastle University head glassblower Robyn Hare created a beautiful artwork that was presented to us at the ceremony.

We felt honoured to be in the company of such inspiring colleagues, and we are grateful to the parents who participated in the project for their commitment and generosity.