Labour Room
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Mote 102, Edinburgh - March 2026
Labour Room is an exhibition of paintings and a birthing chair exploring personal recollections of childbirth and labour. The works convey powerful visceral experience, reverence and tenderness, asking how painting might give expression to embodied memory. The series stemmed from a desire to examine my own past and reflect on the profound transformations that occurred during pregnancy and early motherhood, alongside in an interest in institutional attitudes to childbirth. It is part of a contemporary conversation around gendered and reproductive labour and the representation of maternal experience.
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The birthing chair is painted with gestures and motifs that echo those of the paintings, alongside overlapping excerpts from 'Parturition' (1) , a poem by Mina Loy, written in 1914, which expresses, in both words and form, the progress of labour. It is a full-scale replica of an 18th century birthing chair from the collection at the Surgeons’ Hall Museum in Edinburgh. My father (a skilled furniture maker) and I made this chair together. I was interested in the tension between the restrictive appearance of the structure and the application of painted imagery and poetry which suggest an altogether more uncontained experience of birth.
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Mote 102 gallery, previously a pharmacy, is set in a community location in Leith, Edinburgh. For one day during the exhibition the space was closed to the public and used for a training workshop for birth workers including doulas, midwives and yoga teachers.
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Mina Loy, “Parturition,” in The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, ed. Roger L. Conover (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/145363/parturition