Canterbury CT2 7NZ
United Kingdom
helen@birthrites.org.uk
A unique programme of in-person and online lectures, workshops, seminars and one-to-one tutorials around the Birth Rites Collection.
Birth Rites Collection summer school is a unique programme of lectures, workshops, seminars and one-to-one tutorials. It will introduce you to the art collection and facilitate a dialogue between you, your practice and the artworks. The course is led by Helen Knowles, BRC Curator and artist, Hermione Wiltshire, artist and Senior Lecturer at the Royal College of Art. They will help you articulate responses to the art collection in a supportive environment.
If you are a midwife, academic, curator, artist, medic, health professional, art historian or policy advisor, you will enter the course with your own skill set and finish, with a bespoke multi-media pack of visual, textual, auditory and filmic material, each your own responses to art on birth, to be used thereafter in your own future work.
Workshops include shooting and editing short films on mobile phones and reflecting on the themes through visual and written material. We will introduce different perspectives from international guest speakers and chair in-depth discussions that address aesthetics, ethics and the visual discourses of birth.
Themes include:
–How the collection informs and unpacks different perspectives from midwifery, medicine and education, and its potential to change practice and policy.
–Artistic and midwifery practices that address reproduction in the digital age including AI, simulation, VR and new reproductive technologies amid changing perspectives on the non-binary and notions of kinship.
–The Collection’s impact on feminist art practices and the rehabilitation of the visual discourses of birth into art history.
–Censorship of artworks on birth, institutional responses, ethics and the law.
–Sexual reproduction and reciprocity.
Speakers include: Sophie Lewis, Joscelyn Gardner, Francois-Joseph Lapointe, Marta Stysiak, Nora Heidorn, Helen Knowles, Hermione Wiltshire. More announced soon.
We offer two modalities of courses, one in person (subject to the ongoing pandemic), and one online for those who are unable to attend.
Five-day course (in-person)
July 12–16, 10–5pm GMT
Guy’s Campus, King’s College, London (subject to the ongoing pandemic it would move online).
We do not provide accomodation, but we do provide refreshments.
Four-week course (online)
Wednesdays, September 8–29, 7–9:30pm GMT / Saturday, September 25, 1–6pm GMT
This will be a mixture of pre-recorded talks and material, plus online in-person workshops and tutorials.
Cost per course
GBP 450 per person / GBP 300 concession (for practising artists, students and those with a low-income). We will have two bursary places per course (GBP 50 per place). 15 full-price places per course, five concession rate places. Please email born [at] birthrites.org.uk for more information.
