National Maternity Hospital, Dublin
Video installation
This work began in collaboration with the staff in the foetal scanning unit. I then worked with the nurses in the pre-mature unit, and finally produced a video, with parents of babies recently born in the National Maternity Hospital who were teaching their new born babies, of 9 weeks upwards, to swim. New born babies can swim and breathe freely underwater for the first 3 months of their lives. The video became a video installation in the main hospital building. The video showed a pregnant woman swimming, a man dancing, and tiny babies swimming underwater. Having had my 3 children at home, this work is about autonomy, freedom of choice around the birth of your child and chance Becoming beloved is the outcome of giving birth. The dependent child looks to its parent for food and protection in return we are the ones who ,’become beloved’.
This video work seeks to explore in image and sound the joys of birth, of water births and the sexuality of giving birth. Set in water with babies swimming it also explores the independence of the child its autonomy. There is chance and luck involved in birth times, some babies in intensive care grow and prosper others die. The outcome is unpredictable. The video was installed in one of the main corridors in the hospital for 3 months. There is a pace to the video that gradually builds up like the waves of labour to the joyous sound of the arrival of the new born.
Against a thud, thud soundtrack of horses’ hooves, Pauline Cummins’ galloping maturity and confidence with the medium of video conjures a series of images about the high-tech special care unit, a dramatic place forever teetering on the boarders of life and death. The urgency of the audio-track supports reverse-imaged moving pictures shot underwater of a swimming woman, man and infant looking like an animated fantasy cast in stained glass. The thud, thud is taken up visually by floated images of a sea horse, Japanese symbol of fertility, feminist reference to the male fish who care for its young, copy of an embryo. Five minutes of magic.- Meadb Ruane (1995) The Irish Times
