For this exhibition Birth Rites Collection loaned Terese in Ecstatic Birth by Hermione Wiltshire

“We all experience birth – and yet, unlike sex and death (art’s favourite subjects) encounters with birth in contemporary art are rare. Birth is the universal subject – so why is it so obviously absent in contemporary art? To put it down to the oppression of women’s bodies would be a fundamental reason; but it’s more complicated than that. Explicit and direct images of childbirth elicit profound emotional responses. Birth is universal, but it is also intensely private and individual.

​Artists are as likely to self-censor their work on the subject as galleries and museums are to shy away from presenting it in the public space. While safe expressions of birth include pregnancy, breastfeeding and ultrasound scans, depictions of the gruelling, transformative, violent, sexual, psychological and physical consequences of birthing a body from a body are controversial.

​Birth is not, as visual culture would have us believe, always a happy experience. Whether women choose to give birth or not, our bodies are politically policed and defined by fertility; a whole industry has grown around it, from egg-freezing to surrogacy and IVF.

​From a prepubescent age we are taught to fear pregnancy, but later in life we learn it isn’t something we can control. From first menstruation until menopause, women aren’t ever truly free from the question of birth. Conventional ideas about birth are only part of the picture: miscarriage, abortion, and infertility remain taboo topics despite the huge number of people whose lives they affect.

It’s these acute, candid, unflinching depictions of all aspects of birth that we wanted to bring together in Birth – an exhibition of twenty-four artists who are changing our perception of the most underexplored and underrated subject in art.” - Text by curator Charlotte Jansen.

More information at: https://www.tjboulting.com/birth-curated-by-charlotte-jansen