Event schedule:
Donna Szőke will focus on the Canadian Baby Scoop Adoption Era (1945-1985) during which over 400,000 newborns were placed with adoptive families. She will examine the mechanisms that pathologized ‘birth mothers’ and share examples from her visual art that includes the drawing installation 36 Years of Unringing Phones (2023) and her forthcoming animation The Dark Matter Hippo of Grief: An Adoption Story (2025).
Lisa Morriss will bring together her work on haunted motherhood, letterbox contact, and tattooing practices in relation to mothers who have had a child removed from their care through the Family Court system. The focus of her presentation will be on how the women are haunted by the ghostly absence-presence of their child, and how tattooing enables them to survive living with unspeakable pain in the everyday.
Leah Sidi will discuss Anna Reynold’s Jordan (1992) and Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott (2015), two plays that describe the death of a baby following inadequate interventions from health and/or social care services. Addressing how austerity government shapes the lives of women, she will consider how these plays might give us helpful insights into the status of low-income mothers seeking mental health support today.
Samantha Davey and Stella Bolaki will introduce ‘The Artist’s Book: Mothers’ Experiences of Adoption’, an interdisciplinary project employing creative methods to explore the challenges faced by mothers whose children have been adopted without their consent. Samantha will address how legal research into adoption can benefit from innovative approaches and Stella will contextualise this collaboration within the contemporary politics of art and health.
Speaker bios:
Donna Szőke’s research-creation investigates ideas of immanence, embodied perception, the fluidity of lived experience, and non-visual knowledge. Her work circulates as public art, video art, animation, installation, publications, and a smart phone app. It has been shown in Canada, the United States, France, Germany, Hungary, Croatia, Cuba, Turkey, UAE, and South Korea. She is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts and received the Faculty of Humanities Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Activity at Brock University (Canada) in 2017.
Dr Lisa Morriss is a researcher and Lecturer at Lancaster University. She is interested in motherhood, mental health, shame, and tattooing practices. Lisa’s current NIHR funded project, Keeping Mothers in Mind, is focused on the mental health of mothers who have had more than one child removed from their care through the Family Court system. Lisa has a longstanding collaboration with the Common Threads Collective, a collective of mothers living apart from their children based at WomenCentre in Kirklees.
Dr Leah Sidi is a researcher and lecturer in health humanities. Her research specialises in theatrical representations of mental illness and madness in modern and contemporary theatre, and feminist writing on illness, mental health and care. She completed a PhD in English and Theatre Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her book, Sarah Kane’s Theatre of Psychic Life, Theatre Thought and Mental Suffering is out now. She is co-director of the UCL Centre for Health Humanities, and the UCL Gender and Health Humanities Research Network. Leah is a co-convenor of the Theatre and Performance Research Association’s Directing and Dramaturgy research group.
Dr Samantha Davey is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Essex. Her research expertise lies in innovative family law methodology, with a focus on intergenerational conflicts, particularly between grandparents and parents, and between the state and mothers who have lost their children via adoption. She published her monograph A Failure of Proportion: Non-Consensual Adoption in England and Wales in 2020 and Grandparents and the Law: Rights and Relationships (co-authored with Dr Jaime Lindsey) in 2023.
Dr Stella Bolaki is Reader in American Literature and Medical Humanities in the School of Humanities at the University of Kent. She also co-directs Kent’s Centre for Health and Medical Humanities. Her research spans contemporary American literary studies and medical humanities, with a particular focus on illness narratives and women’s writing. Stella has also led creative, collaborative and public-facing work on the topics of health and wellbeing through her project “Artists’ Books and Medical Humanities” and is involved in ongoing work exploring artists’ books in the context of community arts for health and social justice.