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For the last 18 months I have been making a film, Where We Will Go, with parents who have experienced neonatal baby loss, in partnership with Newcastle University, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the RVI in Newcastle and with the charity Tiny Lives. I have been able to apply the processes and research that I have been developing in the studio for ‘To Be Two’ and reflecting upon in this blog.
For the making of Where We Will Go, it was clear to me that the intense and deeply emotional nature of the parent’s experiences required a methodology that would create space for them to talk around. In one of our very early meetings, one of the parents said to me he didn’t want the film to be something he couldn’t bring himself to watch. Another parent expressed a desire to make it for her son – the twin of the baby who had died. These assertions were both really useful objectives to begin the project. I wanted to make something that addressed the subject of the loss of a child, but was celebratory, and a sort of keepsake as well as being an honest insight of their experiences that might help other parents experiencing similar things.
I invited the parents to walk with their children somewhere they went when they wanted to think, or talk about the child who had passed away. I asked them to follow a sensory path through this walk, collecting things they found on the way –sticks plants household detritus and found objects as well as snippets of conversation, drawings in sketch books and any resonant thoughts and memories.
These materials were infused here in my studio and made into inks stains papers – a sort of pre-lingual toolkit we could use to ‘speak through’. In our meetings at the university, we used these inks to write and draw – a way of creating new contexts for painful pasts.
Using transcripts made of our conversations in the workshops, as well as the sketchbooks the parents wrote and drew in, I wrote a script for the film and together we each recorded parts of it. It was a pretty magical experience. The parents were so invested in the making of these inks and their significance regardless of whether the materials produced the deep blue and purple inks of bilberries, or clear ‘silence’ of distilled dandelion clock seeds.
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In May 2023, Where We Will Go, was awarded a Newcastle University Engagement and Place Award
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screenings:
‘Communities and Change’ exhibition, Newcastle Contemporary Art, July ’23
to be two 