An associate ASU professor and artist is attempting to foster discussion about life’s beginnings with an art project that focuses on the often overlooked and misunderstood experience of birth.
Forrest Solis is the founder of the Creative Push project, which pairs the recorded birth stories of women with local artists in an attempt to accurately and individually represent birth from each women’s point of view. An exhibition of the project will open at ASU’s Step Gallery in the Warehouse District this First Friday.
Rather than focusing on the fact-based, clinical questions people often have, Solis wanted to look at the emotional side of the birthing process.
The inspiration for such undertaking came from Solis’s personal experience and the conversations she experienced after. She said people only wanted to discuss the lighter topics of the process and not how birth affected her.
“Whenever I had my son someone would say ‘Oh, how was the experience?’ and what they want to hear is ‘Oh, it was fine, I had an epidural or I was in labor for eight hours and he was x-amount of pounds,’” she said.
This led her to a realization that there was more to be told than the traditional small talk new mothers are typically engaged in.
“They don’t really necessarily want to hear about the story, the whole story,” Solis said. “And I found that I wanted to tell that story.”
Solis chose to express her emotional experience through art, a field she loved since adolescence. But in the process, she realized there was no open platform in which to share these experiences with others.
This is the void that Creative Push is attempting to fill. By acting as an artistic outlet for the birth stories of others, an almost taboo topic is being explored and allowing women to discuss these life-altering events to the fullest.
Those who have participated in the project said it is not only interesting, but healing.
Natasha Murdock, an ASU grad student in Creative Writing, shared her story as part of the project and spoke to the root of the problem that Solis and the project is attempting to remedy.
“Not a lot of people really are aware of what goes on during birth, and a lot of people maybe don’t want to — or don’t think to — care,” Murdock said. “You have a baby, everyone is so focused on the baby, and everyone tends to forget that the mother just went through something.”
Murdock said sharing the other, less-attractive side of birth with someone who could relate was a positive experience.
“It was nice to get to talk about myself in a place where I didn’t have to fear judgement, or being called selfish, or being dismissed because I should just be happy that my baby was here,” Murdock said.
Tasked with expressing Murdock’s story in a visual medium was artist Haylee Bolinger. Solis contacted Bolinger after she saw Bolinger’s thesis exhibition that explored fertility and sexuality in the abstract form.
Bolinger said listening to Murdock’s story was particularly impactful because of the cadence, passion and even humor expressed by Murdock. All of those elements went into her creative process for the piece, a sculpture.
Bolinger created work that she hoped would make the viewer, “respond emotionally to the physicality of the piece.”
With more than 50 stories and 25 works of art like these, Solis has high hopes for expansion. And with a virtually endless supply of stories, she said she hopes the conversation will only grow louder. She aims to collect over 100 stories and 50 participating artists by the end of the year.
“If we can give a face, or a voice, to these different circumstances and different variety of experiences, and break down some of those judgments, then that’s a wonderful thing,” Solis said.
The Creative Push exhibition will be on display from Feb. 4-13 at the ASU Step Gallery at 605 E. Grant St., opening at 4 p.m. with a reception from 6-9 p.m. on First Friday. The exhibition will showcase 20 works and feature a screening of Irene Lusztig’s film “The Motherhood Archives.”
Contact the reporter at Erick.Fowler@asu.edu.
