Would you like to contribute to an art collection related to preterm birth? The Birth Rites Collection is holding an intensive and summer school and invites midwives, students and birthworkers to add to the interdisciplinary project. Hannah Coom, Marketing & Communications Intern and Helen Knowles, Curator/Director, Birth Rites collection, explain.
The Birth Rites Collection is the first and only contemporary art collection in the world dedicated to childbirth.
Founded in 2008, the Collection aims to challenge the historical absence of birth in contemporary art and to foreground the subject as one of urgent relevance across medical, social, political, and aesthetic domains. Since its inception, Birth Rites has supported artists to engage critically and creatively with childbirth and reproductive care and has commissioned new work that expands both artistic and clinical understandings of these experiences. The Birth Rites Collection comprises photography, sculpture, painting, artist books, print, wallpaper, drawing, new media and film.
Previously housed in the Mary Seacole Building in the Midwifery School at the University of Salford (2009–2017) and across four buildings on Guy’s Campus at King’s College London (2017–2021). It is now based at the University of Kent, where it continues its mission to generate dialogue between artists, clinicians, researchers, and members of the public about the cultural, political and embodied realities of birth.
As a core part of the Birth Rites Collection public programme, we run the BRC Summer School. Launched in 2019 and this year, being run online and in-person at the University of Kent, it is an intensive programme of lectures, workshops, screenings, and tutorials, led by curator and artist Helen Knowles and artist Dr Leni Dothan.
New Work on Preterm Birth
In 2024, the Birth Rites Collection launched a landmark partnership with the newly launched Tommy’s National Centre for Preterm Birth Research and Imperial College London to commission a series of new participatory artworks over the next 3–5 years. These commissions will explore experiences of preterm birth through community engagement, creative practice, and interdisciplinary collaboration, and will eventually join the core Collection.
Poet Courtney Conrad and artists Hannah Conway, Anna Perach, and Sarah Sudhoff have each been commissioned to work with people around the UK to explore the complexities and emotional landscapes of preterm birth. Their work will reflect the lived experiences of parents and healthcare professionals and confront questions of mortality, trauma, care, and survival.
The partnership brings together leading voices from the arts and obstetric medicine, including consultant obstetrician Dr Catherine Williamson (Imperial College London), who contributes her expertise on preterm care and reproductive outcomes to these dialogues. This unique collaboration marks an unprecedented merging of disciplines to create powerful new tools for empathy, awareness, and change.
A Space for Midwives & Birth Workers
Birth Rites Collection deeply values the voices of midwives, student midwives, and birthworkers in shaping how birth is represented and understood. These perspectives are critical to the Collection, and the Summer School welcomes your insight, questions, and experience.
The summer school introduces participants to the collection and encourages dialogue between the artworks, this year’s themes, and participants’ own creative or clinical practice. Whether you join for the full four days or just the morning intensive on preterm birth, we invite you to take part in this evolving conversation. Your work, in and beyond the clinic, is vital, and we would love for you to be part of this growing interdisciplinary community.
Join Us: Birth Rites Summer School
To support this work and open it to wider communities, the Birth Rites Summer School returns in June 2025 — offering three tailored formats to suit different needs and levels of accessibility:
- In Person Summer School (7th – 10th July 2025), 4-day course (In-person)
University of Kent, Canterbury, CT2 7NU, UK
- Online Summer School (Wednesday evenings 19:00 – 21:30 (BST), 11th June – 2nd July 2025 & 14:00 – 17:00 (BST) Saturday 28th June)
- Preterm Birth Morning Intensive (10:00 – 12:30 Thursday 10th July 2025)
University of Kent, Canterbury, CT2 7NU, UK
Book here:
Summer School (Online & In Person)
Pre-Term Birth Intensive
Previous participants have included midwives, medical students, doulas, artists, birthworkers, and scholars, many of whom describe the course as a rare space to explore the complex realities of birth through the lens of visual art.
The 2025 Summer School will focus on the following themes:
- Navigating mortality from preterm birth to postpartum
- Artistic responses to preterm birth and reproductive trauma
- How the Collection informs midwifery, medicine, and education
- Feminist art practices and the visual rehabilitation of childbirth in art history
- Censorship, ethics, and institutional responses to representations of birth
As a participant, you’ll enter the programme with your own perspective and leave with a bespoke creative output, whether visual, written, auditory, photographic, or performative, to continue using in your personal or professional life.
Hannah Coom
Marketing & Communications Intern
(Funded by ArtFund)
Birth Rites Collection
Helen Knowles
Curator / Director
Birth Rites Collection
May 2025
Image Captions:
Kinderwunsch, 2006–12. From the book Kinderwunsch, printed by La Fabrica, Spain, 2014. Inkjet print on cotton paper mounted on Aludibond, twenty-eight pieces, 70 x 90 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Birth Rites Collection.
One Day Young Series, Sonia and Florenca by Jenny Lewis. Courtesy of the artist and Birth Rites Collection.
The Birth Project, 1980-1985
Creation of the World Needlepoint 5 c. 1985 EU#82 CW NP5 Medium: Creation of the World Needlepoint 5 Painting on 18 mesh canvas by Judy Chicago with Lynda Healy Needlepoint over Chicago’s painting by Susan Hill, Julian NC. Courtesy of the artist and Birth Rites Collection.