In/Out Pregnancy

In/Out Pregnancy is part of the 1:1 series. A4 sheets of cotton fabric were laid on the artist's Riyadh rooftop; she laid her body on each one, letting it move and settle. Arranged together, the resulting geometries and two-tone cyanotype palette recalled pregnancy and the days after birth: the body's boundary between inside and outside, made suddenly and permanently visible.

The work began as a study of joints and movement. I laid A4 sheets of cotton fabric on the Riyadh rooftop and put my body on each one in turn, letting it find positions that recorded different joints. Cyanotype made the contact exact: each sheet holds the impression of my body at 1:1 scale, including the moments of awkwardness that came from reaching and repositioning to capture what the camera cannot.

When I arranged the sheets together, the geometries surprised me. The odd angles and the two-tone cyanotype palette recalled my pregnant body, and my body in the days after the births.

I hadn't thought much about the boundary between inside and outside my body until pregnancy made it impossible to ignore. I could feel feet pressing against my bones, elbows moving under the surface of my stomach. Space inside me was being negotiated by someone else, and my body was being handled differently: at home, in the midwife's office, out in the world. After the birth, standing at a traffic light a week later, I had a clear thought: my body felt like a large empty cylinder. The world had seen my insides. Any pretence of a boundary was gone.

This piece holds both the method and its subject in the same surface. A contact print is, literally, an inside made visible on the outside. The cyanotype arrived at the idea before the words did.