Natalia:
When did you start focusing on women’s health and wellbeing in your practice?
Sarah:
I became involved in this idea of women's health after I had a baby. I thought that I was going to probably give up any idea of being an artist or doing art, but that having a baby was supposed to be the end of that kind of idea. What I discovered was actually, it made me much more determined to be an artist. I thought, if I only have this very small amount of time, tiny little snatches of moments when you're already really exhausted, if that's all I've got, then all I want to do is to be making art in some way.
I started by writing a blog, because that was easy to do, I had an iPad, and I could write on the iPad whilst breastfeeding, and then I turned it into a little book on the challenges of having a baby and ideas, inventions to address that. Then I started talking to other women who'd recently had babies and also were concerned about their art. Out of that grew the Women's Art Activation System, which is now just me and one other artist, Sharon Bennett.
We get people together who want to make something when they've just had a baby or are going to have a baby. We always incorporate a doula or a midwife, because we consider those are also people who are putting a lot of work into the idea of birth, reproduction, and care. They bring a different dimension alongside our art practice and we're supported by them as well.
Having a baby shifted my perspective on being a woman. Without having a child, it's easier to mimic a standard male type life. When you have a baby, that separation suddenly just becomes a chasm. Men get hormonal changes when they have a baby, they're not giving birth, but they go through a lot of changes. It's not as extreme and the physical demand is nothing like ours at all, but suddenly, there’s this gap. And that is where we see the career gaps, that's where we see the impacts.
Suddenly the woman has to step away from what is considered “productive work” and do something private. There's a whole kind of conversation around whether this is “real work” and whether it should be sponsored by the public... To me it very clearly is work. So there's this tussle that's quite interesting and problematic. I don't know how we solve it, we have to figure out as humans what kind of society to build, taking into account types of biological experience. That's really what the work is about.
In this surge project, I brought in a very unique experience, which is extreme sickness in pregnancy. Pregnancy and birth are incredibly complex, and really quite amazing processes that culturally, we know very little about. We learn the basics of reproduction in school. You get the cross sectional diagrams and a chart of some hormones going up and down. You don't get a sense of what it's really like and you don't get a sense of the diversity of experience. We talk about women, but we've also got no non-binary people and transgender people giving birth. Who knows anything about that, let alone the basic practicalities and complexity of pregnancy. It's really just kind of hidden.
I was thinking, why is it? I was 39, when I was pregnant, 40 when I gave birth, how did I not know these 10,000 things about my body, my own body, and what it could do? I just didn't know until I was in that situation and thinking I need to go and learn. I'm really driven by this desire to share that.
Extreme sickness is another little niche where even medical staff, midwives, doctors, health assistants don't know about it. They think it's normal to be sick, and you should just get on with it because you're so lucky to have a baby and be sick. That's what we've all seen in the movies, the first turning point in the drama when, “oh my god, she's pregnant”. We don't get to hear about what that's really like. If it's extreme, it's life threatening, you starve to death. It's a really complex, interesting area to work in and I'm quite excited by that.
Natalia:
I think there is a big push right now for more education about women's health. I've seen a bunch of new podcasts and social media accounts where they walk around and ask women “how long is your cycle, name three hormones, ect” and we don't know anything. There's so much misinformation and ignorance about our health. I think in part that's due to medicine and science being mostly male-led in the past. On top of that, it's socially taboo too.
50% of the population is experiencing cycles, periods and living in a woman's body but there's a lack of information. And that’s really crazy to think that even though 50% of us are going through it, we don't know what's going on. So I think it's super valuable that you're trying to find ways to make conversations, to bring things to light and to further that that push towards women health.
Do you want to highlight any other works you've made?
Sarah:
There's something about this kind of culture that blankets out the contributions of female bodies, women in history. So, we unearthed those stories, and created the kind of 101 chart - we made a periodic table of brilliant women and girls.There isn't just this one woman who did one thing that we can talk about, but there's actually loads of women, and the stories get dropped and forgotten and pushed to the side. Thats the idea of the period table, elevating that.
I've also done this project, called 100 Goddesses. I made 99 paintings and added a mirror. Some of the Goddesses I kind of intuited or invented - like the goddess of disappointments - and then there's also Goddesses from different cultures and times around the world. It's touches on traditional imagery, but also really inventing my own. People would come into this gallery and just burst into tears because they're not just seeing one picture, or even 10, but an entire space filled with the faces of the diversity of the experience of being a woman.
It's something I explore a lot, this idea of needing to see images of our actual experience rather than what is being asked of us to perform. we've got all these different aspects, you know, if we look across cultures, we've got so much expression. And I think in my culture, I need more of that. So I'm trying to create more of that.
Natalia:
That's very beautiful. I think it speaks a lot to women's mental health in a way, accepting all the different facets and all the different ways it can look, to be a woman and to experience what it's like to be one.
Well, where do you see your work going in the future?
Sarah:
In the Women's Art Activation System with Sharon, we're developing a project about birth histories. We’re starting to say, look, we should have the history of childbirth and pregnancy reproduction, miscarriage, loss, all these things, in museums, history, and archives. That might help us feel a bit more like it's a familiar experience, help us have role modeling and learning. A big aspect is heritage, the idea of heritage of these experiences.
Natalia:
Sounds amazing, that idea of having a heritage and a story of all the different stories of birth giving. I think it’s really precious because it doesn't exist and I'm sure every person that identifies as a woman will be drawn to that, and will want to explore the diversity of experiences that can be contained in something that is essential to being a woman, whatever that means nowadays.
Sarah:
So Natalia, would you like to tell us something about your work and how it relates to International Women's Day?
Natalia:
You know, sometimes I think we define ourselves in contrast to what's around us. When I'm here in London, I'm super Colombian. But when I'm in Colombia, people are like, “Oh, she's the one that lives in London”. We're defined in contrast. So now that I'm surrounded by other people like me in the MA Art and Science, I can focus more on being a woman in the field, and not just being someone who does both art and science. I'm a woman, in neuroscience and in art. And that's been very powerful.
Before, when I practiced art back home, I focused very much on neuroscience, I did a bunch of portraits of people with different pathologies, and would overlay them with neural correlates of the pathology. So if it was Alzheimer's, I would draw the hippocampus with low neuron density. If it was antisocial personality disorder, I'd overlay a person with their amygdala lacking the coronin1 protein, a risk factor for antisocial personality disorder. It was a very scientific art. But now that I'm here, I've been able to focus on being a Colombian woman, on being a Latina, and that’s come through in my work.
For example, I wrote my dissertation about Doris Salcedo, a Colombian artist, and how her art evidences Colombia's collective memory and trauma from our violent past. And I focus on women artists and how their art is working as art therapy to heal Colombian society. My parents and grandparents generations lived through the most horrible violence, and they repressed it all. They don't speak about the violence, they simply have very avoidant behaviors. They do not go down certain roads, do not visit certain restaurants, don't speak about certain friends that disappeared. It's very avoidant. But now there's a big movement in Colombia to heal this repressed trauma that we've inherited through generations. In Latin American society, women have always been the ones to bring out emotional conversations. They’re the carers and the healers. And it's artists with these intentions that are trying to heal the country. So that’s a bit of my dissertation, and now I'm making art to try heal myself and my family. It’s grounded by my family's personal story, and backed in neuroscience, while focusing on those healing capabilities that I think are an essential part of being Latina.
Sarah:
So you've spoken about the history in Colombia and your own family history, and how that's impacted you and how your work is addressing that. And you've started to touch on that idea that women embody or hold some kind of specific role within within a society around healing. Do you feel like Colombian women have experienced the violence in a particular way?
Natalia:
I think the experience for men and women in Colombia was very different, because men were seen as more active, while women were seen as more passive and protected. But women carried the burdens of the losing the men. Of course, loads of women were victims of the violence too, especially a lot of nurses, a lot of Red Cross workers, and soldiers. But for civilians, it's women who remain and who carry the burdens because men kind of have trudged on. Nowadays it's the women that kind of push to have these emotional conversations about the past. It's very evident in the culture back home, men will avoid any sort of vulnerability, because they had to in the past, to be strong, whereas women now want to unload that burden from the past. My mom tells us way more than my dad does about the things they experienced. My dad will simply not go down that street. But if my mom drives past it, and was the quicker route, she says, “No, I don't want to drive down there. I've seen bodies there”.
I do think women definitely experienced violence and healing differently, and I think we still experience the world quite differently... in art and science, it's very interesting, because I think as women, we don't put things in separate boxes all the time. Men are very good at compartmentalizing and they do that with everything. We don't do that. We relate to the world and to people in a more relationship-centric kind of way, everything is related to everything.
For me, art and science weren’t ever in separate boxes. So when I'm looking at art, I look at it with a scientific perspective. Or when I'm in the lab looking through the microscopes, I'm looking at art. I think that really pushes my practice forward because I'm able to blur the lines and make a scientific discovery about something artistic or take or look at brain scans and think, “wow, this is this is stunning, I wonder who could’ve painted it”. We find relationships between things that I don't think men do. I don't I don't know if you agree with me, but I find that we relate things to each other constantly.
Sarah:
I definitely relate to that myself very strongly. And I think when when things are compartmentalized, it allows a lot of control and domination, it allows things to be managed and controlled. So there's an advantage to that. But then I think about well, the classic description of the Renaissance artist, and they were all the famous men, (we don't know much about the Renaissance women). DaVinci is this hero of that concept of designing helicopters and doing beautiful paintings and crossing all those boundaries. Society has now shifted, everything's very, very separated out, incredibly clear and simplified. And that does go counter to being a young woman, a woman with a baby versus, a woman in menopause, a working woman...you can't compartmentalize yourself so easily.I'm just wondering are women allowed to be seen as DaVinci in the arts and sciences? Or do we need to again, be kind of boxed back into something less expansive and less heroic?
Natalia:
That's a great question. I think I'm lucky to be in a MA that is very open minded, Central St. Martins is a place where there are less boxes. Everyone's fluid, everyone moves between the boxes. But I think in a broader sense, it's hard for people to be told that I'm an artist and scientist, they want to put one first. It usually goes like this: “What did you study?” “Well, neuroscience.” “Okay, you're a neuroscientist.” "I'm also an artist”... So I think people do have a hard time placing someone like me, in more than one box. But, speaking of Da Vinci, he was a polymath, and we don't try and put him in boxes, right? He was DaVinci. And he was a genius. I think that label of “polymath genius” is readily placed on men but held back from women. I don't have many male classmates but the ones that I do have are more easily spoken about as “geniuses” when they do physics and painting. I think we have less wiggle room to be more, to also be geniuses. Whereas society wants to just give us one little thing that we can do. We're pushing against that and I think we have to be many things as women, because we have to be mothers, girlfriends, sisters, have careers, be creative, be strong, be independent, be sensitive. We have always had to do everything and it's interesting because we're all pushing for that now. Women in science and women in art, women in politics and women everywhere. It's not just women everywhere, but women doing everything at the same time. Because we are better multitaskers than men. That's a fact.
Sarah:
Is that a Neuroscience fact? That women are better multitaskers?
Natalia:
I don’t want to say it’s neuroscience in case I’m misremembering but I’ll say its true in my lived experience.
Sarah:
Yeah I relate to that idea that there’s a pressure to fulfill lots of paths yet only being called one thing. And I find the paradox of seeing a multitalented man as a genius but a woman is seen as confused if she’s doing more than one thing, like she needs to be fit into a template. What is a female genius? Where’s our template for that?
Natalia:
Who is our Da Vinci? It’s so disappointing that I can’t come up with a Da Vinci equivalent right off the bat. But its special too because the first woman that comes to mind is my mom.
I think we’re very good at being interdisciplinary humans... maybe its because we don’t put things in boxes all the time, and relate everything to everything. But maybe it’s because we experience more biological change that we’re so good at doing more than one things at a time, because we constantly experience change within our bodies.
Sarah:
It’s the joining of the dots, the patterns, that are very important to me.
See this published on the UAL website here: