Anna Holt

I created this highly emotive personal grief piece using oil pastels on sugar paper in one long two-day sleepless session, at the peak of menstrual hormonal distress. It was important for me to work this way so that I could truly express the intensity of raw emotion and harsh experiences lived by women who are otherwise ignored and forgotten by society. This creation was an important stage in processing my own situational grief and bringing it, hopefully quite literally, out into the open. It is a thematically dark piece, but of a common, very real life experience it is vital we start to acknowledge and talk about.

The central figure represents the raw embodiment of the childless woman. Her abdominal void, a very literal reminder of multiple losses and emptiness, naively depicted in a heart shape as though drawn by one of those missing children. Her arms and hands are delicate in form to convey vulnerability, but she also stands firmly in position as she is grounded from her journey.

She looks out into a framed but dark and gloomy abyss. This item symbolises two possibilities dependent on her stage of the grieving process. On the one hand it shows a window into the lives of others, whose lives are filled and driven forwards by the lives with their children, a view of purpose and the future, where she sees none. Missing friends and family who have moved on without her. No-one sees her or her grief from the other side. On the other, it is a mirror, blank as she has been so broken down by her experiences she no longer knows who she is, she has no identity. Is she even still a woman? The lady she recognises with hopes and dreams for the future has gone, along with all the memories she hoped to create, and little lives to carry her own memory forward too.

As we look to either side of the central figure, we see the general public, as caricatured and troll-like in their appearance as their verbal outpourings are ill-formed and hyperbolic. Their vitriol, disgust and hatred visible via exaggerated features and bright garish colouring, intertwined with abackground of twisted flame and distorted features.

I considered adding some of the content of things commonly said to childless women, but the rage and looks of accusation and mockery felt more palpable in the silence of the piece.

While the main subject looks on into the dark through the judgements and chaos, we see she is emerging from a cave-like pit. It has taken her so long to come back to her own life that moss has grown on the rocky enclosure and as we head deeper into the heart of the image, we get glimpses of the invisible and traumatic journey she has made. The roughly depicted white figures are versions of herself even she can no longer make out. IVF syringes and ampoules lie discarded in the darkness, lonely figures ofwaiting, wailing and anguish, and finally 3 tiny crosses from the babies she’s lost along the way.