Caring Through Cloth: Textiles and the Trauma of Stillbirth

Abstract

The Caring through Cloth project links rituals of sensing, caregiving, and making with baby clothes and related textiles to adaptive coping in stillbirth loss. Stillbirth is traumatic because it (a) disrupts the natural order of life, (b) is an ambiguous loss, leaving little tangible evidence to validate or narrate it, (c) is a cultural taboo and stigma, disenfranchizing loss, personhood and parenthood and (d) can lead to complicated grief. As such mourning stillbirth is challenging both psychologically and socially. Blankets, baby clothes and soft toys feature in clinically based stillbirth rituals which promote physical contact, caregiving, and memory making. Textiles form part of memory boxes and are often used to assist personal rituals. Arts projects and charities gift or support the making of textile objects to aid those who grieve. Despite this, there is limited analysis of the significance of textiles to mourning stillbirth and little exposition of the theories of meaning which are employed. This study adopts a psychobiological understanding of art and uses Dissanayake’s Artification Hypothesis and Gibson’s theory of Affordance, to examine the role textiles play in mourning stillbirth. This paper (a) reviews literature and contextual sources and (b) uses auto and sensory ethnography to investigate the relationship between textiles and mourning stillbirth. It identifies that baby clothes and related textiles afford rituals of sensing, caregiving and making that can be used to artify and express, through analogy, the needs and cares of parents who have experienced stillbirth. These initial findings have informed the design of a Caring through Cloth workshop, which seeks to support parents in their adaptive coping and collect qualitative data to further assess the adaptive significance of sensing, interacting and making with textiles in arts-based activities.