"Sending baby dust to you all..."

Abstract

My ongoing interdisciplinary practice-based PhD research considers ways in which understandings of (In)fertility are manifested within the texts of women in personally led online forum spaces and the bigger hidden narratives around these fragments. Looking at (dis)embodiment through language within artistic practice, it considers alternative linguistic interpretations of this dis-ease within and against authoritative medicalised rhetoric and asks what other semantics can emerge in dialogue here. This seeks to reimagine(In)fertile Embodiment through creative feminist praxis, within non-normative “sub-maternal” subjectivities and temporalities, traversing intersections of invisibility and silence through formulations of absence and its material presence. Emerging experiments, as discussed in this article, embrace an embodied methodology of hope and failure, interspersing words and images, text and matter, through interpretations of textual metaphor and data visualisation. The research seeks to engage audiences emotionally around this stigmatised reproductive discourse and assert its re-presentation within a new “maternal spectrum”, expanding the parameters of maternal art and beyond.