I spent over eight years breast-feeding my children and it is ten years since I stopped feeding my youngest child when she was two years old. I do not have a photograph or any image from this time, from eight years of my time in close and intimate connection with my infant children. This makes me feel profoundly sad, an emotion I had never before acknowledged until I visited Holding Time.
Holding Time is a project supported by Arts Council England, designed and developed by photographic artist, Lisa Creagh, whose ambition is to create a UK-wide portrait of breast-feeding. It is being shown at Open Eye Gallery between 15 September and 30 October as part of ‘An Ecology of Care’, an exhibition that interrogates the collective action of people involved in various aspects of health and social care. A commission from ‘Improving Me’ via Cheshire and Merseyside Women’s Health & Maternity Programme enabled Lisa to engage with 18 Liverpool mothers and their babies.
The exhibition is shown upstairs in gallery 3. It includes a series of stop-motion portraits that fill one wall and runs for about 11 minutes; six fixed photographic portraits of mothers with their children (four on the right-hand wall, two on the left) with posters of QR codes for access to interviews with the mothers in the portraits; and a longer series of interviews with a range of local mothers accessible via i-pad and headphones. There is also a smaller screen on the left-hand wall that displays changing cosmati-geometrical patterns: these changing symbols are important to the artist as signifiers of time. A living-room rug and small sofa are positioned at the centre of the gallery facing the stop-motion portraits, with a small table for the i-pad and head phones to the right of the sofa and additional seating provided by four bean bags. The stop-motion portraits start with a single central changing image of one woman and child that is shown for a minute or so and this then changes to three moving portraits of women feeding and holding their children. The changing tryptic images are accompanied by the gentle music of piano and harp, a composition by Helen Anahita Wilson. There is a feeling of calm and intimacy here. The furniture suggests domesticity, the repeated images of women and children are both iconic and familiar and we can choose to engage with their voices, through listening to their accounts of motherhood and breast-feeding, as a one-to-one experience.
One thing that struck me when listening to women in their interviews is how little I knew about breast-feeding when I had my first child. I cannot remember anyone in my family breast-feeding a child when I was growing up.
This exhibition feels like important work because it makes the essential bond of mother and child visible and in doing this it challenges the silent and widespread assumption that breast-feeding should be secret and invisible. The interviews also offer a great source of experience and knowledge. It was inspiring to listen to these local women talk about their struggles and successes. I was struck by one young woman who spoke about her great-grandmother being “a pro” at breast-feeding and regretting how much family knowledge has been lost about motherhood. This is another reason why Holding Time is important. It is offering one way of replacing lost generational knowledge by raising the voices of women so that we hear maternal stories and consider the struggles and achievements of nursing mothers.
Lisa Creagh’s work here is activist as well as ambitious and is attracting increasing involvement with health professionals as well as breast-feeding mothers.
It is more than a quarter of a century since I had my first child and then my second within the year. I only managed to feed my oldest sons for 4 months each and always felt I had failed them in not keeping going with feeding for at least 6 months. It wasn’t until I had my third child that I felt able and confident, a sense strongly influenced by a wonderful midwife and excellent health visitor. I wonder how different my experience could have been if I had encountered Lisa Creagh’s work. I would like to share and promote Holding Time as widely as possible. It is at Open Eye Gallery until 30 October but a number of the interviews are accessible online. Please share this link with as many people as you can, especially women: https://www.youtube.com/c/holdingtime
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