Sofie Layton
Materialising Loss - An exploration into complexities of Gestation and Grief translated through the medical image
Summary
This PhD research practice examines the potential of surfacing and translating medical data, originally collected for medical diagnostic purposes, into artworks, installations or boundary objects which can also be used within a workshop setting. It investigates potential new uses of medical data in ways that go beyond the medical frame, opening up the potential for a new interpretation of these images and data within and beyond the medical landscape.
Additional info
As part of my research practice, I have been working with the post-mortem autopsy team at Great Ormond Street Hospital London who for the last fifteen years have been pioneering a new non-invasive post-mortem technique. This uses a process known as Micro-CT scanning, a 3D imaging technique which utilises X-rays to see inside an object, slice by slice. Collaborators include Dr Ian Simcock, Professor Owen Arthurs and Professor Jo Wray. Additionally I have been working with a long time collaborator – Giovanni Biglino, Associate Professor in Bioengineering, Bristol Heart Institute, with whom I conceived and realised the national touring exhibition Heart of The Matter (2016-2019), and Dr Stephanie Curtis who collaborated on the installation Tales from the Ultrasound Clinic (2022), which was created in conjunction with female patient participants who attended the clinic.
By examining the inner workings of the human body through an artistic, scientific and participative lens, this research practice not only looks at the medical image but also how the image functions conceptually and artistically as part of the translation of the lived experience of illness and loss in conjunction with the parent, and in particular the mother-child-dyad, within and beyond the clinical setting. This exploration works with data and concepts derived from ultrasounds, magnetic resonance (MR) and micro computed tomography (Micro-CT) imaging which are diagnostic tools for many major health conditions, as well as being a non-invasive tool for post-mortem autopsies. Through the process of working with personal and archival medical information, the artist surfaces and transforms this data, interweaving it with the non-medical to create a new visual and narrative articulation of personal and collective expressions of the liminality of the gestational grief space.
Gestationality by Sofie Layton
During the pandemic, like so many other people, I began to explore low tech ways of making artworks without a studio or workshop facilities. I began to experiment using the cyanotype process, one of the earliest forms of photography, first developed by Sir John Herschel in 1841.
The first photographic botanical collections were made by Anna Atkins who produced a booklet of cyanotype seaweed specimens. Within my own cyanotype experiments, I draw on Atkins’ methods, mixing medical images with seaweed, bell jars and glass Petri dishes which refract the light along with the medical paraphernalia of syringes and gauze bandages. This collaging process becomes a form of caring.
By re appropriating the medical imagery and by having a tactile relationship with this inner landscape, I create a new way of looking at our medicalised selves. Through the alchemical cyanotype process, I begin to explore this gestational space. As Maria Puig de la Bellacasa wrote, ‘the haptic holds promise against the primacy of detached vision, a promise of thinking and knowing that is “in touch” with materiality, touched and touching’.[1]
My work uses medical images normally seen as digital forms on a screen. Viewed on the computer in black and white, they are biological specimens, detached images that exist in a virtual space. Reversed and printed as cyanotypes on Shoji and Somerset papers, they are surfaced and given form and presence.
We are born with our future anatomical realities buried deep within our cellular structures. Our genetic codes determine our congenital beginnings and these blueprinted sequences become the architectural foundation of our future physical selves. Differentiation is sometimes detectable in the developing baby, hearts that don’t form or grow properly can be revealed during the ultrasound scan.
This set of cyanotype images inspired the visual landscape for Tales from the Ultrasound Clinic and is part of a work-in-progress around ‘gestationality’, a term coined by philosopher Astrida Neimanis.
[1] Puig de la Bellacasa, M., 2017. Matters of Care. 3rd ed. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Tales from the Ultrasound Clinic, by Sofie Layton
This artwork was developed through an artist-led exploration of the imaged lives of pregnant women with heart disease, women whose heart stories are unique and not often heard.
Over a six month period I attended the specialist cardiac antenatal clinic at St Michael's Hospital, working with patients and clinicians. These tales and encounters were then woven together into an immersive site-specific installation within the vaccination pods in the Bristol Heart Institute atrium. The resulting artwork became a series of sonic blue amniotic worlds, within which the public could experience the journeys of the patients.
