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 stimulations’ 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’.
