Summer School 2022

A unique programme of in-person 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 collection and facilitate a dialogue between you, your practice and the artworks. The course is led by Helen Knowles, BRC Curator and artist, and Hermione Wiltshire, artist and Co-Head of the Photography Programme at the Royal College of Art. The course will empower you to articulate your own responses to the collection in a supportive environment whilst exploring critical perspectives in the field of birth.

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, 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, politics and the visual discourses of birth.

Themes include:
–How the collection informs and unpacks different perspectives in midwifery, medicine and education, and its potential to improve practice and policy.
–Artistic and midwifery practices that address reproduction in the digital age including AI, simulation, VR, blockchain and NFT tech and new reproductive technologies.
–Changing perspectives on the non-binary and notions of kinship.
–The Collection’s impact on feminist art practices and the rehabilitation of visual discourses of birth into art history.
–Censorship of artworks on birth, institutional responses, ethics and the law.

Speakers include: Helen Knowles, Hermione Wiltshire, Andrew Lawrence, Matthew Stock, Francoise-Joseph Lapointe and Nora Heidorn. More will be announced soon. 

Five-day course (in-person):
September 5–9, 10am–5pm BST University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. On-campus accommodation is available for an additional cost.

Cost per course:
450 GBP per person / 300 GBP concession (for practising artists, students and those with a low-income). Please email born [​at​] birthrites.org.uk for more information or book now here.