Illustration
The Breakfast Club
Commissioned by Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland and the Rotunda Hospital, and funded by Health Research Board Mother and Baby Clinical Trials Network Ireland, The Breakfast Club webcomic series explores the stories of people with diabetes in pregnancy in Ireland.
Shortlisted for Patient Lifestyle Education Project of the Year at the Irish Healthcare Awards 2020.
Everyday Breastfeeding Project
This series of illustrations depicts everyday experiences of breastfeeding – the lovely, chaotic, precious, mundane, lived reality of it. While breastfeeding is the common theme, it is not the central focus of these images; it is simply one component of life as a parent of babies and toddlers.
This series of illustrations was selected for CREATE: The Art of Pregnancy, Birth and Beyond, TCD Science Gallery, July 2018.
Too often, breastfeeding is denigrated by a hostile society and a media that seeks to stir controversy through fabricated “mommy wars”. At the same time, a lot of breastfeeding photography presents it as a divine act performed by women sitting in wheat fields at dusk, wearing flower crowns and billowing chiffon robes, or with full emphasis on the baby and breast – as if it is a dislocated piece of anatomy, separate from the woman and the rest of her life.
The result is that breastfeeding – in a society where so many people have only ever seen babies being bottle-fed – can seem inaccessible and incompatible with modern life. Rarely do we see images of breastfeeding fitting in with work, family, exhaustion, eating, resting, socialising, travelling, sleeping, life.
Reminiscent of nineteenth-century French realism paintings – which depict ordinary women breastfeeding as part of their ordinary lives – these illustrations portray modern women’s relationships to breastfeeding, as part of their modern lives, capturing the ordinary and extraordinary, the mundane and magical. At a time when most western countries are trying to improve their breastfeeding rates, it is crucial that a diverse range of people can see themselves and their lives reflected in images of breastfeeding. It should also be promoted as a feasible, convenient and desirable way to feed after the newborn period, when people's lives begin to return to "normal" – be that returning to work, returning to the responsibilities of caring for other family members, or otherwise existing outside of the domestic sphere.