All the Other Demons in the Room
A conversation about birthwork, vulnerabilities, mental health and mythologies.
An exhibition representing nine years working in reproductive health.
Or, Why I Stopped Attending Births I’ve had a complicated relationship with the birth world from the beginning, but birth work, in its ever changing capacity, has captivated me in a way nothing else ever has. It is brutally raw for both those attending the birth, and the ones giving birth. It leaves no room for dishonesty. We are all humbled in the wake of this intense vulnerability. It can leave you feeling shaken to your core, stripped down, inhumanely inadequate, furiously unprepared, and wildly at the mercy of its unpredictability, even after the most stunning and empowering of births, but especially after the hard ones. The ones that keep you up at night, the ones you’ll think about for years to come. It’s entirely not about you, as the care provider, as the space holder, as the person who coaches and cheers, pushes and holds. And yet, you are part of it on a deep and visceral level. Relationship dynamics, family issues, financial struggles, sex, wounds new and old, we become woven into the tapestry of that story. And we must hold that, all of it, in ourselves and our hands and bare witness to it. Help give it a name. Help cultivate the beliefs and rituals around it. It is an incredible honour, to walk with someone through the process of growing and birthing another human, of birthing a new version of themselves, but the responsibility can feel crushing, especially with the lack of support birth workers receive from the wider healthcare community. Holding someone’s life and history in your hands as they move through this process can make you feel like you’re being strapped into a roller coaster that hurdles through time and space. This work touches a deep place within our collective psyche, this kind of space holding. It is ancient and ancestral, pre lingual and prehistorical. In the global shift towards centralised healthcare and moving away from traditional practices and skills, such as attending to people birthing in an out-of-hospital setting, birth workers are often left floating on their own in isolation as practitioners. From the humble traditional birth attendant to the highly trained and regulated nurse midwives, we are separated from one another by educational elitism and hierarchical gatekeeping. Birth is taken out of a cultural and community context along with all of its tradition, practices, and knowledge and is placed in the hands of institutions with deep structural wounds that perpetuate harmful cycles. In short; It is immense work and I am tired.
All the Other Demons in the Room
Oil on canvas board.
2021
Birthing Mountain Entity
Oil on canvas board.
2021
This piece was the inception, the first painting I conceived of and created to process what it meant to work in proximity to birth. And, its name was the first hurdle I encountered. There is a lot of cultural weight to the word demon, especially in a South African context. It conjures many different feelings, elicits a variety of reactions, and inspires a sense of fear in many. The term "demon" is derived from the Greek word daimon meaning divine power, fat, or god. The translation of demon is "replete with wisdom" connoting that demons are highly knowledgeable entities, evident in their knowledge of an individual's illicit sins. In this regard, I understand a demon, not to be a force of evil, but to be a neutral archetype representative of our most human, most fallible, and most carnal tendencies. This painting recognises that we all have demons, and they follow us and make themselves known in times of great change, immense vulnerability, and in our most intemperate of moments. The birth room is a place where all of our demons, all of our guides and personal histories, coalesce to tell a story about how this one person entered our world. Amid what love and chaos, hurt or disharmony did we come to be known? Conceptually, this image represents what it means to attend a birth where all the boxes have been ticked, all the protocols have been followed, and the outcomes, often excellent, but to come out the other side feeling like your soul, and what was left of your emotional fortitude, had been put through a garbage disposal.
Rabbit, watching.
Oil on canvas.
2021
The Mountain Entity
Oil on canvas.
2021
Dreams and Mythologies In a tent on a windswept mountain, surrounded by errant piles of lonely stones and determined shrubs of the steep landscape, I waited for a baby. Laying in the dark, in the liminal stupor between asleep and awake, the low rumble of building adrenaline from the endless waiting disallowed sleep to take me. And in this place, void of light and noise, in the frosty chill of the fall air, a dream came. Crawling over the scattered landscape on cloven hooves and long hands, tall, thin creatures with ashen grey skin, and great wooden masks moved with a purpose. They were dusted with dry clay of the earth, its powdery thickness coating every inch of them, crumbling away with each movement. They glowed a soft blue in the light of a full moon, and on their powerful eland legs, the Mountain Entities brought me the baby I had been waiting for, sleeping soundly in the arms of one of the formidable creatures. As he bent down to pass me the child, as my arms reached for her, I startled awake. Covered in sweat with my heart pounding in my chest, I did not sleep the rest of the night. The next morning, as soon as the sun rose, I drew the mask I had seen as I continued to wait for the baby that heralded the Mountain Entities. I have dreamt of them dozens of times since, each visit, a portent to new life. An omen, a message, a birth. I have several theories as to why I dream of this particular archetype in conjunction to birth, and none of them are entirely satisfactory. At its most basic level, birth is inexplicable, and as such, our brains create stories to try and make it make sense. My Mountain Entities signify the reverence I hold for this most ubiquitous process, its enigmatic unfoldings, and its unpredictability. They also represent the persistent anxieties that plagued me while I waited and the many restless nights I struggled to sleep when I was on call.
Rabbits, sacrificed.
Oil on canvas.
2021
Rabbits, hanging.
Oil on canvas.
2021
Sacrifices The act of attending births, being on call, tending to those experiencing huge life changes, means that we must actively sacrifice much of ourselves, our personal freedoms, and even our virtue in the name of our calling. The act of giving birth involves many forms of sacrifice, each perceived differently by everyone who undergoes the process. Humans have participated in the act of ritualistic sacrifice for a millennium. It has been written in our deepest histories, retold in our most treasured stories, and yet, it is something that can make us squirm in our modern society, especially if we are removed from such traditional or ancestral practices. Rabbits, historically, have been a symbol of sacrifice, of fertility, of reproduction. Rabbits, to me, have become a symbol of things that must be sacrificed for births to happen. Sacrifices from the parents, from the birth workers, from the baby, etc. In 2017 I was called at a decent hour in the early evening and made the short drive across town to a client’s house. Turning into their driveway, heart full of excitement and gratitude, a very unexpected black rabbit dove in front of my car, giving me no time to swerve. It died on impact, and the image of its body on the side of the road followed me the rest of the evening. In the wee hours of the next morning, as an unresponsive baby was resuscitated, the black rabbit swam across my mind, and I thanked it for its sacrifice. The baby took its first breath and let out an ear-piercing scream that rang in my ears for days after. Several months later, I was driving across the garden route at three in the morning. Upon entering an unremarkably bland suburban estate, another unexpected rabbit appeared in the beam of my headlights. Darting into the road it unceremoniously threw itself into my front tire. The resultant thud and bump of my car made me groan aloud, sending up an apology to the unknown spotted rabbit. I felt awash with guilt and unease until I pulled into the driveway of an innocuous house. Entering the home, all thoughts of the rabbit I accidentally killed left my mind as I was immediately thrown into witnessing the worst postpartum haemorrhage of my career. Since the first incident, five rabbits in total have met their fate at the front end of my car, and every single sacrificial rabbit has preceded some sort of emergency management at a birth. All of the outcomes were good, but at the end of the day, it's not just the outcomes that are important. It is also the journey. Each of these five births took me to the heart of pure existential dread, led me straight into the abyss of unbridled nihilism, and brought me out the other side with no tangible answers and a deep-seated appreciation for life’s fragility.
Portrait of a Birth Attendant
Oil on canvas.
2021
Serpentine Birth
Oil on canvas.
2021
Ritual Rabbit
Oil on canvas.
2021
Pink Time Forest Drive
Oil on canvas.
2021
Thresholds in Waiting
Oil on canvas.
2021
All the Other Demons in the Room
Video Instillation
2021
This was an interview conducted by my partner with images from births in my community and further afield in South Africa. All images and videos clips are original and given freely with permission for use for this expressed purpose. The video effect was used to maintain privacy and anonymity. My hope with this video instillation was to immerse people in the liminal experience of being called out in the dead of night to sit with someone through an immense life passage.
