Ellie Shipman

The quilt collage reclaims the surgical blade in an act of creation, and speaks to hidden women's labour and the dichotomy between 'domestic' and 'medical' birth experiences. The traditional quilt block patterns splice together glimpsed triangles, hexagons and diamonds of products ranging from episiotomy suture training models; breastmilk expression trainers; placentas and umbilical cords; and new born babies from their PROMPT birthing trainers for training on C-sections and a range of other birth interventions and delivery techniques.

Each collage focuses on products from a year or two year span, selected at random intervals throughout Limbs & Things' 33 years in industry, from their founding in 1990 by medical illustrator Margot Cooper. The collages are a visual representation of product changes, improvements, adaptations and discontinuations, indicating much wider, complex changes in approaches to clinical birth training and new motherhood around the world.

The Catalogue Series (2007 - 2008)

Collage on graph paper, 42 x 29 cm.

£280

The Catalogue Series (2007 - 2008) is one of a series of six collages created during a residency with medical simulator company Limbs & Things. The work repurposes archival catalogue images of the company's midwifery training products as paper quilts on graph paper.

Unheard

Photographic scan on giclee paper, 15 x 15 cm.

£240

Connecting objects across generations, I hold my late father’s scalpel which he used for cutting negatives in his photography studio, scanned as a photographic image - a technique he also used in his personal work. The scalpel in my hand repositions the control, or lack of it, I experienced with the birth of my son - my father’s grandchild he will never know - reflecting on the medicalisation of the birth experience and the perceptions and contradictions of ‘natural’ and ‘medical’ birth journeys.

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Emma O'Rourke