An action (pain)ting on labor

Notes and description

How can one express birthing pains in a two dimensional medium? How does one express birthing pains who has never experienced birth? Is it pain? What kind of pain? How did childbirth become associated with pain? Techno-medical profession wants women to be numb, epidurally drugged out, and spaced out during the birth of her child. The midwifery way suggests that natural childbirth can be ecstatic, even orgasmic. How is this possible? The takeover of women’s bodies in the medical profession has been happening for centuries, since the witches were burned at the stake for being healers and wise women. Doctors replaced the old ways, using their scalpels and instruments to penetrate and pry into her bodies over time. Why have a natural birth? Because it’s natural. Because it is not a disease to be pregnant, to have a child. The disease is the overuse of drugs and doctors to interfere. Perhaps the pain is meant to be there to help women understand the awesome power of sexual reproduction. Perhaps we are programmed to believe that childbirth is excrutiatingly painful. We see it in films and sounds and television.

Again, I ask, what does it mean to express “pain” or rather the certain future of “pain” in a painting? Abstract action painting seemed the most appropriate. To use from a modernist era the impulsive, subconsciousness-driven, instinctual process of painting on a canvas or some other medium my thoughts as they arise about pain. Bodily in execution. Moving on or around the medium.

In a ritual-like trance, I used paints and a pink plastic water float to expunge the pain. A Sonic Youth song sung by Kim Gordon pumped in the background. I warned the audience to participate in whatever way they feel will help the mother in pain. I began with squirting paint onto the float, squatting down in mimicry of pain, my belly big and bulging, my ass also big and embarrassingly bulging.

I cut out images from mothering and pregnancy magazines, happy moms with babies, the false promise of capital and consumerism to ease the pain of labor. The medical establishment bliding us to their poisons and potions. Some participated by ripping out pages from the magazines and placing them on the now multi-colored and wet floaty thing that I had been slipping on. Their participation felt good, as if it aided in the birth of this piece.

Squatting down again, feeling the intensity build in the song and in my body, half in trance, and half aware, I went for the final push. Rising, I cut the invisible cord. I let the tension fall, I laughed, I looked at everyone. It was an odd catharsis, everyone watching the woman in some vulnerable visibility of body art.

As it all ended, by body was saturated with color and the stickiness of an orange. Completely stained by the process.

Can labor become a state of ecstasy? Why must I believe "pain" is associated with birthing? This black box, is it true without ever having had a child, yet? How can I reshape or eradicate the fear of pain and labor? The imprinting is pervasive in our western medical culture of disease, treating the pregnant woman like a ill patient. But I am healthy, and I can imagine the birth as bliss, as pleasure, as even erotic. Can't I?