"Disturbing and Vivid." That’s how Alicia headlined it in her link. These images really resonated with me, especially this one, even though I’ve never experienced cesarean section — well, not as the mother, anyway.
The ghostlike and luminous, impressionistic (and yet hard-edged) quality of the artwork is very much like the mental images I carry from my second child’s birth about two and a half years ago. That birth, at home, was almost textbook-smooth, uneventful really, but very intense, and I spent much of it in the altered mental state that a friend calls "laborland." My strongest memory is of an almost synesthetic experience during the (fairly short) pushing stage. I described it like this in my birth story:
Suddenly I am hanging from them, squatting down, as a contraction comes over me. In surprise I shout, "Oh my God, I’m pushing!" My body surges deep inside, and I feel the baby descend. I have barely recovered when it happens again. Here comes the contraction, and I sink down, hanging, and at the bottom of it the baby drops through me just a little farther.
And again. I can nearly see in front of me my own pelvis, not like a photograph but instead some internal mind’s eye picture of it, a fantastic hinged cage of ivory opening up (an ice cream scoop’s halves sliding one inside the other, an arcade’s claw game unclosing, a bracelet’s clasp retracting into itself). Each flex reveals a glimpse of a round red fruit, releasing it heavily inch by inch.
Clicking through the art on that site seems, a little bit, like seeing a nightmarish alternative ending of the same dream. The luminescent ovoid in the picture I linked above — well, that’s not far from the "round red fruit" I was seeing back then.
My impression is that, if I can have such weird, disjointed, dreamlike mental images of my own peaceful homebirth, I can easily see how someone whose births went awry and were recalled with pain and regret and a sense of violation — could create art like this.
UPDATE. More comments on Cesarean Art from VoirDire Subculture, another interesting blog. Check ‘er out.
bearing blog 