‘52 weeks’, installation detail (2025), Millie Walton.

I began documenting the impacts of motherhood on language, specifically my language, when I was pregnant. I normally find it easiest to express myself in words but in this case it was different. I found I didn’t have the right words, sequencing or rhythm. Whenever I started something it didn’t feel natural or authentic, and so the documentation began in a visual format. I took photographs of my naked, swelling body and breasts, closely-cropped, often from an upward angle which in another context might be considered overtly sexual or even pornographic. It’s interesting to me that the pregnant body complicates those assumptions. I’ve reflected on this more since having given birth, but at the time, it was an attempt to capture the expanse, the feeling of capaciousness and of being stretched. That said, there is something obscene in those images and in the way in which pregnancy takes hold of the body. I made very quick drawings of those photographs – it became a daily practice – and wrote a few lines over or around the drawing. Looking back, I don’t like what I wrote. I don’t think the writing is particularly good; it feels awkward and clumsy, sometimes overblown, which is probably because the language I was using was inherited from what I’d read, heard and been taught about pregnancy and didn’t come close to the experiences I was actually having. But I think the value of those works lies in their temporality, how they capture the beginning of a strange, stuttering process.

Sketch from pregnancy diary (2023).

After my son was born, I stopped taking photographs and making drawings and started writing again. My head and mouth were full of words I’d hardly ever used before, some of them I’d never encountered – lanolin, let down, bleb – and of images that made me feel so scared that I found I was often literally shaking. I imagined smacking my baby’s head into the doorframe as I walked through it, falling flat onto his body, laying him down in the middle of the road, people coming to take him from me in the night – countless scenarios of potential harm or death. Like most new mothers, I felt deranged from exhaustion and often totally incapable of looking after myself, let alone a baby. But I also felt an extraordinary, overwhelming need to make things, as a way of recording and understanding what I was experiencing but also as a response to often feeling out of control – making as a form of support, not just release.

I wrote when I was feeding, usually in the middle of the night or in the early hours, and on my phone because that was easier than finding and holding a notebook and a pen. I allowed myself to write whatever came into my head and I posted those fragments onto Instagram, paired with artworks that resonated with the words or what I was feeling. Researching art made about or adjacent to motherhood was inspiring but not always particularly easy to find. It felt fortuitous that the exhibition ‘Acts of Creation: on art and motherhood’ was touring not long after I’d given birth. Particularly influential was Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an exhibition “Care”’, a three-and-a-half page document that makes a case for domestic work to be made not just visible but also to be valued as an art form. Ukeles later described the manifesto as a ‘survival strategy’, a phrase I might also use to label my own early writings in motherhood. You can sense that urgency in the language she uses, the lack of punctuation, a feeling of rage and breathlessness. Ukeles, unlike me, is primarily a visual artist, but it is interesting that in a time of ‘life or death’, she also reverted to words rather than images – perhaps reflecting how language is always connected to our own experiences of becoming verbal and of learning the order of the world. I was also drawn to Susan Hiller’s Ten Months (1977–79), an installation in which images of her swollen belly – resembling the curve of a planet or a lunar landscape – are positioned alongside extracts of text written in the third person, conveying a sense of distance that highlights the strangeness of growing a human inside one’s body. Again, there’s that desire to document and make sense of abstract bodily experience through words.

Screenshot from Babe Station Instagram ‘2 Weeks’ (2024).

The writing I posted onto Instagram was often completely unedited – it was an experiment in letting go, as well as a need to connect my solitary experience of new motherhood with the outside world. I was particularly interested in how my language changed over the weeks and months, how there sometimes seemed to be a sense of cohesion emerging between the fragments and then there would be a sudden shift in voice or mood.

Screenshot from Babe Station Instagram ‘26 weeks’ (2024).

It was, like Hiller’s Ten Months, a kind of diary, but I also saw it as an experiment in making art within a set of new and shifting boundaries. As an extension of the writing and research I was carrying out at home, I began running workshops for other new mothers, where we discussed extracts of text and wrote together while holding our squirming babies. These workshops were fundamental in introducing me to contemporary writing around motherhood and to other mothers’ experiences. They also revealed the potential of creating in a public space – the focus and support it can provide, which in the context of motherhood can make the difference between making and not making.

Screenshot from Babe Station Instagram ‘46 weeks’.

I continued writing and posting on the Instagram account for one year: 52 weeks. The text included in the journal is the piece that I wrote, as I wrote it, on the day my son turned one. The photographs are installation shots of the text as an interactive artwork. This work was developed for and first included in the group exhibition ‘Sorry about the mess’ (8–30 March 2025), which I curated through Babe Station, an evolving art and research group, born out of that same Instagram account.

Installation view ‘52 weeks’ (2025) in the exhibition ‘Sorry about the mess’ (8–20 March 2025).

My intention was to create a ‘moveable poem’ which could be reinterpreted by anyone regardless of whether they were a mother. The text is broken into words and phrases vinyl-printed onto cotton fabric, with strips of Velcro attached so they can be ripped off and rearranged. The tactile aspect was very important: I wanted people to be able to hold the words, to perhaps experience a sense of nostalgia in hearing the rip of Velcro and to use their bodies to create new iterations.

Installation view of visitor interacting with ’52 weeks’ (2025) in the exhibition ‘Sorry about the mess’ (8–20 March 2025).

The first version of the work took the form of an oversized display board, in response to the setting in which it was shown: an old office space. More recently, for my solo exhibition ‘more or less’ at BOTH Gallery, Highgate (6–9 August 2025) I developed it into a full room-sized installation, covering the walls in blue fabric and scaling up the words and phrases, some measuring over two metres in length. For both exhibitions, the text began in its original form and was then left to evolve before being reset for the next day.

Installation view ‘more or less’ at BOTH Gallery, Highgate (6–9August 2025).

In writing the text, I imagined countless possible arrangements, but I have yet to see someone land on one of those sequences – each rearrangement feels completely new and profoundly intimate, like reading a stranger’s diary. Some people spend a significant amount of time selecting the words they will use, while others are immediately drawn to just one or two phrases. There’s vulnerability in surrendering your work to strangers, in standing back to let them interpret and play, but it feels fitting to the role of a mother too: how you birth and care for a child so that it can exist on its own.

That is not to say that the care is gone when the work is shown in public – it is simply passed into other hands. The edges of the strips of fabric are unsealed so that as they are moved around, the threads begin to unravel, leaving traces of another person’s touch. To me, this research and work is a way of attempting to create a space that is both intimate and communal, supportive and unstable, and a recognition of motherhood as an experience that we all share regardless of whether we have birthed or desired children.

Visitor interacting with ‘more or less’ at BOTH Gallery, Highgate (6–9 August 2025).