Today I wanted to provide links to artists and writers exploring their experiences of baby loss, through their own creativity. For me, the creative impulse increased when I was dealing with grief, I think that’s quite common. The creative arts are certainly a way of making sense of experience, transforming it into something else, something manageable, and again, having that conversation with other big brained, social animals, as we are hard wired to do.

I don’t know much about Andrew Foster and this is quite an old article, but there seems to be precious little art and creativity by fathers experiencing baby loss. They are often over looked in the conversation with health professionals, bereavement midwives, GPs and counselling, so it’s good to see men, dads having this voice, speaking about it, remembering publicly.

Adında Van ‘t Klooster is an artist I know something about, having had the honour of writing a poem for the project, Still Born. I’ve always found her exploration of her own experience through art inspiring, alongside her straight talking, yet sensitive questioning of the societal implications of baby loss, and how the impact of it and work towards preventing placental issues, which account for a huge number of preventable baby loss, can be raised.

Like many, many people,  Frida Kahlo is an inspiration. She is iconic, a woman expressing her life through the medium of her own self portraits. her painting Henry Ford Hospital is a brutal depiction of miscarriage.

And finally an article by and about Claire Mackintosh who returned to her own grief via fiction.

x