Online Programme

Gemma Anderson-Tempini

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2007, I have exhibited widely in the UK at The V&A Museum, Camden Art Centre, The Wellcome Trust, The Freud Museum, The Drawing Room, Newlyn Art Gallery and The Exchange, The Golden Thread Gallery, The Eden Project, The Jerwood Foundation and internationally at ZKM Karlsruhe, Kröller-Müller Museum, NL and The Pratt Institute, NYC. Since 2007, I have established a series of collaborative art/science projects, including a Wellcome Trust Arts Award (2009), a Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence award at Imperial College London (2012) and multiple international residency awards.

My work centers on drawing as a way of knowing across disciplines. I often investigate processes that are beyond observation and collaborate with scientists and scientific labs. In 2015, I completed a practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London which led to two peer-reviewed books with Intellect Press: ‘Drawing as a Way of Knowing in Art and Science’ (2017) and ‘Drawing Processes of Life’ (2023). The latter developed from a major AHRC award (£377K) for the art/science/philosophy project ‘Representing Biology as Process’ with philosopher John Dupré and cell biologist James Wakefield at the University of Exeter (2017-2021). I have also published numerous peer-reviewed articles in journals across arts and sciences and a collection of artists’ books with independent publishers. In 2023, I completed the Artangel and Leeds 2023 commission ‘And She Built a Crooked House’. It brought together my experience of mothering twins and my work with higher-dimensional geometry through new experiments with sculpture, audio, AI, music, light and drawings.

Yasemin Eroglu

Yasemin Eroglu (she/her) is a Mad, neurodiverse scholar and budding art historian who is pursuing her MA in Art History at Concordia University. As an immigrant and settler, with much gratitude toward the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation, she currently lives, learns and works in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.

Predominantly focused on visual art, her research interests span interdisciplinarity, mental difference, medical humanities, politics of disclosure, (in)visibility, self-representation, and methodology. Her current thesis project explores notions of madness, sightliness and seriality, within the broader area of women’s bodily self-representation, and takes an Intersectional Feminist and Mad approach. Her ultimate goal is to trouble and expand diverse disciplinary boundaries with notions of madness and mental difference.

Birgit Heimbach

For around 35 years, I have been producing images as an artist on topics such as obstetrics, breastfeeding, infant therapy, and midwifery. With these images, I want to convey knowledge about anatomy and physiology, the components of breast milk and breastfeeding techniques, philosophy and ethics, and obstetric skills. At the same time, the images should contribute to empowerment, reflection, empathy, and joy in the profession through their appreciative design – I am particularly interested in trainees, but also in experienced midwives or other professional groups, as well as other interested parties. Through my work, and by incorporating works by other artists, I want to convey testimonies of people's experiences and feelings related to childbirth in order to learn from them (e.g., violence prevention). The works encourage empathy, fascination, and motivation.

My images are framed by my own texts in professional journals such as the German Midwifery Journal. I produce booklets for obstetric conferences, make books, and participate in exhibitions with my work, sometimes even holding smaller exhibitions of my own.

In 2017, I illustrated the book "The Student, the Patient and the Illness: Ascona Balint Award Essays." It contains essays by medical students who, on the occasion of the Ascona Balint Award (in honor of Michael Balint), describe in detail their experiences with patients, each followed by a theoretical analysis, reflection, and conclusion.

Martina Hynan

I am an artist, researcher based in the West of Ireland. Over the years my work has focused on maternity, women in visual culture. I have worked as a feminist socially engaged artist for many years with women’s community groups and midwifery students, on projects such as Keeping Mum (2008-2010), a participatory art project of shared birth stories through artmaking, exhibited in Ireland and Canada. I was also a national co-ordinator, artist and curator with the successful legislative campaign that secured mandatory inquests for all maternal death in Ireland. This campaign was led by The Elephant Collective, a grassroots community activists group (2015-2019). I curated the multimedia art exhibition, Picking Up the Threads: Remaking the Fabric of Care, which was central to this legislative campaign.

Recently, I completed my interdisciplinary research with art practice PhD at the Centre for Irish Studies, University of Galway (2018-2023), funded by the Galway Doctoral Scholarship. My thesis, “On the wisp”: Rethinking birthplace in Ireland for a more-than-human world, explores the entanglement of birth with place within a more-than-human world. Through interdisciplinary methods that blend art and scholarship, I interrogate anthropocentric narratives and foreground the agency of bodies, environments, and nonhuman actors in the birthing process. This work sits at the intersection of feminist environmental humanities, visual culture, and medical humanities.

At present, my work is building on my PhD research. This includes experiments with biomaterials. I am interested in cultivating an art practice that will expand understandings of what it is to be born. Thinking about birth as a co-creative entanglement of the human with the non-human is part of my emerging eco-social art practice. It is my hope that developing a more-than-human relationship with birth and consequently birth politics will open ways to challenge the current hegemonic maternity system.

Alexandra-Odette Kypriotaki

I was born and raised in Crete by an Egyptian-Lebanese mum and a Cretan dad. I started writing stories when I was 7 years old. That's how I decided to study Communication, Media and Culture at Panteion University and then worked as a journalist for some of the largest media in Greece. In 2010, I joined the MA program in Aural & Visual Culture at Goldsmiths University, London. A multidisciplinary, apocalyptic, intense, 10-people seminar where I reinvented myself while working closely with the team and my tutor, Mark Fisher.

For the last 10 years my life has been revolving around collective structures of being, as well as parenthood. After living in a kibbutz in the desert, I came back to Heraklion and became a parent of 3 kids. While working as a copywriter in communication and as an art director in videos, I engaged into the creation and running of two big, collaborative projects: "Apo Koinou" and "Paidokipos" KOIN.SE.P. There, we have been implying a strict participatory decision-making process while trying to understand each other. The acts of childbirth transformed me. For the last few years, birth has been the main interest of my personal research, "We all come out of a vagina": I collect birth stories, talk, read and think around the act of childbirth. A while ago, I quit my job in order to pick up writing again and swim at the sea in the mornings.

Jaqueline Leung (she/they)

Jackie Leung (she/they), JD, MS, is the Executive Director of the statewide nonprofit, the Micronesian Islander Community (MIC), and is an Assistant Professor at Linfield University. Jackie’s background is in public health advocacy, policy, and research. Her areas of specialization include perinatal healthcare, Medicaid, early childhood education, housing advocacy, healthcare access, chronic diseases, COVID-19 services, and leadership pathways for community health workers. She has served in several leadership positions, including commissioner on the Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs and as a traditional health worker representative on the Oregon Maternal Mortality & Morbidity Committee. In her free time, Jackie enjoys spending time with her family and long scenic drives along the coast and through the agricultural landscapes that make Oregon the beauty it is today.

Francesca Pavone

I am an artist with a background in Fine Art and History of Art, with a keen and sustained interest in motherhood. My engagement with the subject began during my Art Foundation course, culminating in a final major project titled The Body as a Vessel, which explored motherhood and filial bonding. This interest deepened during my undergraduate studies, where I wrote my dissertation Picturing Pregnancy: Reclaiming the Pregnant Body in Contemporary Photography, examining representations of pregnancy in contemporary photography.

My artistic practice is grounded in drawing and printmaking, often drawing inspiration from the people that surround me, my family and friends. As such, my work is centred on relationships and familial bonds, on an emotional and physical level. In September, I will begin an MA in Art Education, Culture and Practice, where I intend to investigate the role and possibilities of drawing as an accessible, personal, and connective tool in art education. I am especially interested in how drawing can facilitate dialogue around lived experience, including motherhood.

Through the Birth Rites Collection Summer School, I hope to further examine the intersections between motherhood, artistic practice, and pedagogy, and to develop new perspectives in conversation with the collection and fellow participants.

Laura Stoffel

Laura Stoffel (*1986) works at the intersection of audiovisual practice, sensory ethnography, and socio-political inquiry. In her artistic and academic work, she combines ethnographic methods with collaborative and multimedia forms of representation.

In 2022, she completed her Master’s degree in Social Anthropology at the University of Bern, with a thematic focus on media anthropology and more-than-human-relations. From 2018 to 2021, she was part of the teaching format «Filmmaking for Fieldwork» and accompanied the interdisciplinary dance and theatre production «Rehearsing Afrofuturism (AT)» as a visual anthropologist.

Within her Master’s thesis, she developed the installation «In Resonance. Perspectives of an Acoustic Lockdown Archive» in 2021, which was exhibited in Lucerne, Bern, and Sachseln. In 2022, she contributed conceptually to the exhibition «Natur. Und wir?» at Stapferhaus Lenzburg.

She is part of the Anthropological Network «Interface Commission» and co-founded the association «transFORMATiv» in 2024, which is dedicated to identifying and addressing socially relevant discourses. Its focus lies on taboos and controversies of everyday life, explored through transdisciplinary constellations in collaboration with everyday experts. To be translated into participatory and media-based formats. The current building of the exhibition «GEBOREN WERDEN» is the association’s first project and reflects the existential, social, and political dimensions of birth.

Sarah Sudhoff

Sarah Sudhoff is a Cuban-American artist and community advocate based in Houston, Tx. Utilizing socially engaged and participatory actions, her work explores the intimate themes of motherhood, illness, vulnerability, and mortality through her gendered, bodily, and lived experiences. Sudhoff's works can be categorized into three areas of concern: Ethics of Care (healthcare/ self-care), Artistic Social Practice, and Data Visualization. Her practice holds the subjective and objective in tension. And she believes that the personal echoes a much larger political arena of current events.

Sudhoff explores through her intimate photographs and performance themes of subjectivity, objectivity, and vulnerability in her works, with a particular focus on self-care and the care of others.

Her work has been exhibited at Blaffer Art Museum, McNay Art Museum, Donggang Photo Museum, Austin Museum of Art, Pioneer Works, Luckman Gallery, Magenta Foundation, Filter Photo, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, Galveston Arts Center, and the Colorado Photographic Arts Center.

Articles including her work have appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Time, Cabinet, and Southwest Contemporary. Sudhoff’s research and residencies have been supported by Artpace, Tiffany Foundation, Penland School of Craft, McColl Art Center, Houston Arts Alliance, Kinsey Institute, the DoSeum, and DOMUS Artist Residency in Italy.

Sudhoff’s recent exhibitions include; Massey Klein Gallery, New York; grayDuck, Austin; Andrew Durham Gallery, Houston; Sculpture Month Houston; Gatewood Gallery, UNC, Greensboro; and Visual Arts Center, Richmond.

Sudhoff completed an MFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design, New York, and a BA in Journalism and Photography from the University of Texas at Austin.

Sanna Vrij

My name is Sanna, I am Dutch/American and I am a performer, singer, dramaturge and director of music based performances. I studied music theatre at the conservatory of music in Rotterdam (Codarts). I am part of Club Gewalt, a company that produces, composes, makes and performs their own music based performances. My work focuses on themes of social justice and attempts to innovate music theater as a genre. It is usually akward, funny, punkish, nerdy and loud. I work mostly in the Netherlands, but my work has been presented in venues abroad as well, among others BAM New York, Komische Oper Berlin and the Venice Biennale.

Besides my own artistic practice, I have a lot of experience as a teacher and coach. I taught interpretation and performance at the conservatory and worked with many young makers after graduating, advising and assisting them in setting up their own practice. In this work I focus on defining their artistic signature and in what ways they can organize or fund themselves to serve their artistic objectives.

I am also the mother of two and have experience with postnatal anxiety, depression and Burnout.

Eva Marija Vukich (they/them)

PhD Research Fellow, Music Therapist, Full-Spectrum Doula

Eva was born and raised in a Croatian/American home in rural Alaska. They received a bachelor’s degree and certification in music therapy (2013), with piano as a primary instrument, from Temple University in Philadelphia, USA. Following clinical work in neurodiverse care and migrant healthcare settings, Eva received an MA in refugee studies and community development (2016) from University of East London, UK. Their master’s work focused on the development of an intersectional and socioecological framework that trauma-informed practitioners could integrate into refugee and migrant care settings. From 2019-2022, Eva worked as a clinical music therapist at Boston Children’s Hospital, gaining experience in infant neurodevelopmental care, palliative care, and multicultural family-centred care. With Ancient Song (NY), Eva trained to become a full spectrum doula, later integrating this into their private practice in Salem, MA, USA. In 2023, Eva relocated to Bergen, Norway joining a qualitative research project now exploring the ways that parents and preterm infants together create connection and relationship during early life in the NICU. As a PhD candidate, Eva is interested in how arts-based practice and methods can ground pragmatic research in daily realities and align with reproductive justice activism.

In-person Programme

Sue Bridge

I am a visual artist. I paint with oils and gouache, and make short animated films. My practice often responds to themes of health and wellbeing, encompassing both real experiences and imagined scenarios. Exploring women's health and our primal bonds with the elements, which begin in the womb and continue throughout life, is at the core of my current work. Some of my pieces are imagined, yet deeply rooted in these primal connections.

I studied Visual Communication in Birmingham, graduating in 1985 and became a designer, animator and illustrator in London, spanning 30 years at the BBC. A yearning for authentic self expression brought me to painting and to Folkestone in 2016, where I was able to become a full time artist. I won the Cass Art Prize for most innovative use of colour in 2023. I have been selected several times for Mall Galleries. My animations have been shown at The Turner Contemporary and The Photographers Gallery, London. I won awards at Women over Fifty Film Festival 2020 and 2021 at WRPN Film Festival.

Pamella Elexpe Cardoso

I am a Brazilian publicist turned birth and documentary photographer, dedicated to capturing life’s most authentic moments—from the intensity of human connection to the quiet power of nature. Raised in a half-Spanish family, I speak Portuguese, Spanish, and English, a multilingual background that fuels my passion for diverse stories.

In 2019, I moved to Brighton with my husband to support his PhD journey while building my photography business. My work is rooted in documentary storytelling, whether framing the profound intimacy of birth, the poetry of everyday life, or the raw beauty of our surroundings. Through my lens, I seek to honor both human resilience and nature’s enduring presence.

India Lawton

India Lawton holds a BA (Hons) in Photography from The Arts University Bournemouth and an MA in Photographic Studies from Westminster University. She also holds a PGCE from Oxford Brookes University and an MA in Education from the same institution. Currently, she works as a lecturer and Deputy Head (Education) for the Department of Art and Music at Solent University, UK, and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. India is pursuing a practice-based photography PhD at Solent University while engaging in part-time research. Her artwork explores birth trauma and the maternal body through experimental practices that combine organic materials, AI-generated imagery, and fairy tale symbolism. Her work has been exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally.

Chloe Maguire

I am an independent curator and producer from Ireland, focused on collaborative arts and exhibition making. My practice explores curatorial methods around expanding artist publishing, and addressing issues around female health and in visual arts through the emerging project, Mothering Spaces. Through exhibitions, public programming, and dialogue, Mothering Spaces aims to connect artists, health researchers, and the public. In 2024, it commissioned its first exhibition, Maybe I’m being dramatic by Lauren Hamilton, exploring the artist’s lived experience of Endometriosis, supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. Upcoming Mothering Spaces projects include a public workshop with Emma Quin at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in 2025, and an exhibition with Nicola Sheehan at Backwater Artist Studios in 2026. My broader experience with organisations such as GalleryX, Muine Bheag Arts, and Cavan Arts Festival continues to shape and inform my curatorial approach.

Hannah Renton

Hannah Renton is an award-winning filmmaker making tender and subversive films, exploring care, intimacy and resilience. Her work has screened internationally at festivals including BFI Flare, LSFF, Aesthetica, Rhode Island and Kiev Molodist, as well as in museums, archives, and community and art spaces. She is a graduate of the NFTS and considers the Essex mud her muse.

Her most recent short film Gossip was shortlisted for a Student BAFTA and is currently on tour across East Anglia, with sold-out screenings and strong local engagement. She is now developing new works that blend contemporary and historical narratives, and experimenting with inclusive, collaborative processes rooted in East Anglian communities and landscapes.

She also regularly works with other artists and organisations. Notably, as an associate on Olivia Plender’s commission for the ICA, Many Maids Make Much Noise and with Spectacle Media, an award winning production company specialising in participatory media.

Corrina Thornton

Corrina Thornton (1978, Wales). Bachelor in Ceramics from Bath Spa University 2009, Master of Fine Art, Academy of Art and Design Bergen 2011. Received the established artist grant (10 years) in craft from the Norwegian Arts Council, and was Assistant Professor in Ceramics and Clay KMD, Bergen 2018-2024. Thornton is a professional artist who has exhibited internationally including at the Korean Ceramics Biennial 2011 and 2015.

Thornton is currently studying for a PhD in Fine Art at the University of Bergen, Norway. The project is titled: Do you hear me now? Expressions of maternal experience through autoethnography and ceramics and clay (working title). Investigating the potentials of expressing maternal disempowerment, using multidisciplinary practices grounded in clay and ceramics, its material contexts and craft histories to create new societal understanding, cultural narratives, and potential models of care for mothering people. She makes works which share the internal and emotional experience, allowing the being in and sharing of the unpalatable, the uncomfortable. Using feelings as a valid content and motivation in visual art and utilising the making of art as a research method, a reflective tool, and an instigator for change.