This Making Space residency is an opportunity to test Holding Time as a multi-screen installation featuring animation, stills and video. Using material created over the past three years of breastfeeding mothers, this four day installation will test a working method of showing stop motion portraits alongside an abstract 'time map' based on Cosmateque designs. 

For new mothers there is little in popular visual culture to affirm their new role as mother and breast feeder. Many new mothers want to feed their babies but feel isolated breastfeeding at home and may not have the confidence to breastfeed in public. This work sets out to remove the barriers to breastfeeding, whilst positively promoting this role in society by providing positive images of mother and child relationships. 

The portraits are designed to represent a broad range of mothers including mothers of a variety of ages, nationalities, mothers with young babies up to small children. Most of the mothers are separately interviewed for The Parlour website in collaboration with sociologist, Lucila Newell. 

Using constructed patterns comprising of glass geometrical shapes, I am producing an ancient kind of ‘encoded’ of information within each portrait of mother and child that encompasses the duration each mother has spent breastfeeding to that moment (http://bit.ly/2cy5hP0). This work seeks to re-contextualise motherhood in general and breastfeeding in particular as an active, rather than passive activity, aligning mother and child with an older, more universal time system. 

In Conversation with Christiane Monarchi from PhotoMonitor

Thursday January 18th 6.30-8pm

The residency will also feature a one to one discussion with Founder and Editor of PhotoMonitor, Christiane Monarchi. Christiane is the founding editor of the online magazine Photomonitor, dedicated to photography and lens-based media in the UK and Ireland. Over the past 5 years Photomonitor has published more than 700 features online from over 200 contributing artists and writers and maintains a comprehensive online listings guide for exhibitions, auctions and events in photography.