ABSTRACT
When a baby is born very prematurely and looked after in the Neonatal Intensive
Care Unit (NICU) a vast assemblage of medical kit and practices takes over
the baby’s care from its mother. This includes hi-tech equipment such as the
incubator, monitors, syringe drivers and breathing apparatus, but also everyday
and handmade objects such as towels, nappies, tiny hats made up by nurses
and blankets crocheted by volunteers. There are also the artefacts and practices
of countless mundane procedures, the bottles, tubes and litmus papers of
syringe feeds, the needles, notes and heel pricks that test blood gases, the
soaps, gels and towels of handwashing and infection control, the ‘gentle stimu-
lations’ or hand pats ‘reminding’ a baby to breathe, and the touches of nurses,
parents and others that clean, oil, soothe and hold. It was through and alongside
this constellation of objects and practices that I came to know my son in the
NICU environment when he was born early at 26 weeks. And when it came to
developing an art project for the mother and baby unit where he was cared for
at Homerton Hospital in Hackney, East London, I looked back at the things I
had kept from his stay and realised the extent to which this socio-technological
matrix was ever present in all my notes, photographs and keepsakes from this
time. It was the kit and procedures, despite and through which mothers make
relationships with their child, that became the focus of the project I developed,
‘This Is For You’.
