Ikon presents a programme of exhibitions and events that engage audiences in dialogue about health and wellbeing.
Conversations range from infant feeding in public spaces and the medicalisation of maternal bodies to the impact of natural environments on our physical and mental health. The programme contributes a comprehensive evidence base to inform policy development for Birmingham City Council Public Health, such as a creative health strategy.
Artist-in-residence Sally Butcher presents Visible Bodies, focusing on themes of gender, care and the space of the reproductive and maternal body, through the lens of her practice-based research about experiences of infertility. Butcher works with Ikon’s display of Feeding Chair (2022), a collaborative artwork which acts as a focus for sharing experiences and challenging social attitudes towards feeding and mothering.
Feeding Chair, Ikon Gallery, 5 June – 7 July 2024.
Ikon hosts Feeding Chair (2022), a collaborative artwork which invites parents and carers to feed their young children in galleries and other public venues. Featuring artwork by artist Jade de Montserrat, the chair integrates audio works and videos about infant feeding, gender and public space. The work acts as a focus for sharing experiences and challenging social attitudes towards feeding and mothering. A screen and speakers in the headrest offer sitters specially commissioned audio artworks about feeding, resting and public space.
“The Feeding Chair provides an opportunity through the visual arts to discuss barriers to infant feeding with fresh eyes. As a society we don’t openly discuss this essential part of raising a child and the way that public settings preclude parents from this important time with their child.”
Dr Justin Varney, Director of Public Health, Birmingham City Council
This presentation is supported by Birmingham City Council Public Health and Arts Council England. The chair is part of Feed, developed by In Certain Places at University of Central Lancashire, in collaboration with Corridor8 and Textbook Studio. feedproject.art
Sally Butcher: Visible Bodies, Ikon Gallery, 5 June – 7 July 2024.
Sally Butcher presents Visible Bodies, responding to Feed’s themes of gender, parental care and public space, as artist-in-residence at Ikon Gallery. During the residency space and through a series of public workshops, Butcher creates performative text pieces that explore alternative meanings around the reproductive body.
“I’m drawn to Feed’s use of women’s stories to inspire the chair’s making and the fragmented audio narratives that sit around the body in the feeding space. Developing this interest in sharing lived experience, I wish to create work using women’s words around (in)fertility not as a story-telling project, but creating pieces that brings these women’s accounts together creatively in a collective telling.”
Sally Butcher
