[𝐃𝐚𝐲 𝟏𝟔] 𝐋𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐬
𝟐𝟏 𝐃𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞, 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐮𝐦𝐚 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐕𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐌𝐢𝐝𝐰𝐢𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐲
[𝐃𝐚𝐲 𝟏𝟔] 𝐋𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐬
I’m not good at visual art. An old boyfriend who was an artist joked that when I looked at him, I didn’t see features, just ‘eye’ written where his eyes were, etc. Lately, I’ve been trying to develop some kind of visual style. So I’ve been thinking about patterns. I like the shine coming off water, reflections from drinking glasses, and parallelograms of light that move across rooms as the day goes on. In film and photography, there is the ‘golden hour’, which is dawn and twilight, where light is redder and softer, so everything looks amazing. You can recreate this with artificial lighting, but it will not be the same.
I think the golden hour is also important because it’s transient. I’ve always been more attracted to autumn than spring, partly because that’s when my birthday is, but also because there is a sense of urgency to make the most of it before it’s gone. In Japan, this idea is often illustrated using cherry blossoms, which are spectacular for about a week and then gone.
Labour and birth are like this too, all that time spent growing a baby, and then there’s this weird, intense, transient process that disappears afterwards. You can recreate it with artificial oxytocin, but it’s not the same. It’s necessary sometimes, but not the same. Labour is a liminal space that we step into. Patterns of contractions, breastfeeding, the veins on a placenta. All-encompassing experiences that vanish into nothing. That’s the beat of the universe, I guess. For all we know, the atoms we’re using used to be from old civilisations that were sucked into a black hole. All the poetry and music from those times are gone forever. Midwifery puts us in a front-row seat for life and death. We recognise our existence through it. Life will be over for us so quickly; that’s why I’m trying to develop an art form of my own, and I’m trying to make some records of light patterns.
All my best,
Ellie.
