The increasing reliance on medically derived data and imagery in diagnostic processes can leave an individual feeling emotionally alienated, particularly when this is related to the grief experienced through child and pregnancy loss. The PhD examines how such data and imagery can be subject to artistic translation and remediation as a way of opening up the invisible and intangible complexities of grief in relation to child and pregnancy loss, issues that have until recently remained silenced or taboo topics in the UK. The research practice also operationalises post-mortem medical research data and autobiographical and experiential narratives that were collected in a number of clinical and research settings. The consideration of the ethical implications of materialising medical data as part of research practice is crucial to the thesis, as is the critical reflection on the issues surrounding artist-led collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches that is at the core of the work. More specifically, the thesis works with data and imagery derived from ultrasound, Magnetic Resonance (MR) and Micro-Computed Tomography (micro-CT) imaging, which are diagnostic tools for many major health conditions, as well as offering pioneering non-invasive tools for foetal post-mortems. A range of artistic materialisation processes such as cyanotype printmaking, 3D printing, sculpture, creative writing, film, sound and installation practices are drawn upon as part of the research process. These serve to transform and remediate personal and archival medical data, which are interwoven with non-medical material to create new visual and narrative articulations of personal and collective expressions of loss. This interweaving informs the structure of the thesis itself, with visual materialisations and poetic writing punctuating the theoretical framing of the research. Not only do the materialising processes serve to expand on the meanings of the medical data, but also, by returning these artworks as site-sensitive installations to different exhibition spaces and diverse audiences, a gestation and grief space was generated where interpretations around the relationship of medical data and the experience of grief and loss could be uncovered. Several conceptual frameworks informed the thesis. The autobiographical narratives of Anne Boyer, along with other pathographies, in dialogue with Rita Charon’s scholarship on Narrative Medicine, were used to position the patient and parent experiences of being medically imaged. The speculative feminist thinking of Donna Haraway and her concept of ‘staying with the trouble’ as well as Maria de Puig de Bellacasa’s ‘care’ and ’carelessness’, were employed in thinking through the ethical implications of remediating medical data and imagery outside the clinical context. Carol Mavor’s performative writing on art history and visual studies provided a narrative context for the art practice that also situated the research within the arts and humanities field. While this research draws on the work of these thinkers and explores their interconnections, it is not defined by any one of them. It remediates the medical image and associated patient and parent narratives, speculates through these, and generates an alternative space of loss. Further, this research highlights narratives of loss through the realisation of a conceptual and physical gestation and grief installation space into which public audiences were invited. As such, this research respectfully and care-fully proposes that medical data could be made use of ethically, through artist-led interdisciplinary collaborative processes that serve to expand upon the meanings of these data. As such, the present artistic practice could also serve clinical practice (and patient treatment) by helping to identify patient narratives through the artistic translation of the lived experience of pregnancy and child loss.

Funder: LAHP - AHRC [2444222]