Unsurprisingly, angels represent a common motif connecting many of the tributes left at the memorial site. The host of miniature angels hanging from the trees are scaled-down versions of Antony Gormley’s sculpture, and some are even direct representations of The Angel of the North.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
The angels come in a range of different materials. Some have been knitted or crocheted.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Some are made from wood.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Others are made from plastic.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Many of these angel tributes are repurposed Christmas decorations, which have been chosen as memorial tributes because of their significance to the site.
Looking more closely at what is written on or about angels on the tributes can bring us closer to what they might mean for those who have commemorated loved ones here. Many notes left in the trees refer to The Angel as a guardian presence, watching over loved ones. The idea of a guardian angel watching over the dead can also be seen on some of the tributes.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
In the photograph below, the Angels referred to as watching over the dead are both heavenly and material in form, given that The Angel of the North stands directly above the tree from which the tribute has been hung.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
The figure of the angel baby is often used in baby loss memorials, and the angel here represents or stands in for the deceased.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
This idea is echoed in other tributes. Angels might be inscribed with the name of the person who is being commemorated.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Or the person might be described as an ongoing guardian presence for the living.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
In the photograph above, wings stand as a shorthand for the angel figure. Feathers also serve this function, and both images are prevalent in the tributes left at the site.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Angels clearly represent a source of comfort for those who leave tributes in the memorial garden, and we can presume that the solace offered by The Angel of the North initially drew them to commemorate their loved ones there. Looking closer at the tributes, we can find some variation in the ways in which angels offer meaning in the face of death. For some mourners, it is the idea – made concrete in The Angel – that their loved ones are not alone and have a guardian presence nearby. For others, angels are expressive of a continued bond with a friend or relative, who is seen as a guardian angel watching over the living. The angel figure has a particular cultural resonance in the context of baby loss, offering grieving families a recognizable way to express their grief.
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.
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.
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.
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.
