Today we’re sharing a tiny bit of Krystal’s story via this mixed media piece she created.
She shares with us. “This is what I want my reproductive organs to look like. Unfortunately, my uterus has polyps, my ovaries are old, and polycystic, and I have blocked tubes.”
Happy Uterus
Krystal Larsen
Mixed Media
How would you draw, paint, or sculpt your organs to represent what you would like them to look like vs. what they do?
Elizabeth
A few weeks ago, Maria and I had the pleasure of interviewing Kelly Zechmeister-Smith at her home in Ann Arbor, MI. Kelly created a series of watercolors that represent real life experiences she had while trying to get pregnant.
This Friday, we’ll be displaying some of Kelly’s paintings, and the artwork and stories of others living with infertility in Michigan, at the Michigan Assisted Reproductive Technology Summit (MiART Summit) in Novi. The MiART Summit is being held by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services – Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology Section in collaboration with the Michigan Infertility Advisory Committee to bring together diverse stakeholders to learn about infertility and the use of ART in Michigan; explore the association between ART and the incidence of multiple birth, preterm birth, and low birth weight; and develop recommendations to improve ART access, practices, and outcomes in Michigan.
We’ll be sharing our interview with Kelly in a future post but wanted to share some of her artwork today.
Infertility is the Worst
Kelly Zechmeister-Smith
Medium – micron pen and watercolor paint
Artist’s Statement: This work began with an inexplicable creative urgency to represent my layered feelings surrounding my own unexplained infertility (UI)–a maddening diagnosis. Creating small, cartoonish self portraits highlighting my daily experiences as a childless artist and teacher quickly became a therapeutic outlet for me. My hope is that the viewer finds these pieces a playful yet raw glimpse into the life of someone struggling with UI.
Infertility is the Worst III by Kelly Zechmeister-Smith
Infertility is the Worst I by Kelly Zechmeister-Smith
Infertility is the Worst II by Kelly Zechmeister-Smith
For the last day of #NIAW, we wanted to reflect on why we find creating art helpful in our journeys.
Elizabeth
I’ve had a complicated relationship with my house over the past couple of years. My husband, Scott, and I bought it shortly after we married nearly 12 years ago and made the move across town from the house I purchased as a single woman, to this one where we imagined we might raise a child one day. We chose it because of the school district and because the walk out basement was reminiscent of Scott’s childhood home, and the archways and poured plaster walls reminiscent of mine. We walked in and immediately felt we belonged there.
Several years later, when it became apparent that having a child wasn’t going to come easily, I had a dream of recurrent house flooding. Water seeped in through the roughly textured walls and pooled on the hardwood floors. I was in the upstairs hall and trying to keep the water at bay when I heard a chorus of whispers. A chorus I soon realized was the voices of my house itself, resentful of us and acting out because we weren’t filling the house with children.
Even though I still love my home for many reasons, I started resenting it and the fact that it wasn’t fulfilling the purpose we thought it would when we first moved in 11 years ago.
Maria and I recently had a conversation about how our homes have taken on a different purpose and meaning due to our infertility and living in them as families of two. It got us thinking about nesting, which inspired me to create some artwork around that theme. I made this piece, my “Inhospitable Nest” around the memory of that dream years ago. Choosing the materials for this piece and setting aside time to create it was very calming. Weaving the wire in and out was a meditative process and, while I don’t always end up with a product that looks like it did in my head, this one did. Better even. It made me want to create more nests. I’ve since created two more that I will share with you in the coming weeks.
Inhospitable Nest. Elizabeth Walker. Mixed media – copper wire, crystals.
Creating artwork around my infertility experience has allowed me to have tangible proof of my diagnosis. My disease is so invisible to those around me and making artwork that represents it has made it real to me and to those who see it. That’s been invaluable to me in coming to terms with my diagnosis and to explaining it to others, and why I’m so grateful we get to help others create pieces around their own infertility experiences during our ART of IF workshops. So, I encourage you to #startasking how making art might help you in your journey and would love to see what you create.
Maria
This September my husband and I will both turn 30. We actually were born exactly 2 weeks apart – Kevin on the 15th and me on the 1st. Since I was little, I remember the story of my birth. I was the first granddaughter to be born on both sides of my family, so my birth was rather exciting. My uncle always told me how it was a hot day in September and how ironic it was that I was actually born on Labor Day. For years, I grew up assuming Labor Day was about women giving birth — never considering how it was actually about the US labor force. I just assumed that I was special because of being born on this day.
As I have come to accept my infertility, though, I have come to think less and less that it was special that I was born on Labor Day. I actually think it is some kind of bad joke. This year, my actual birth day won’t happen on Labor Day. But as I turn 30, I have been thinking about how I now longer fit in with so many of my friends and family members who are now entering their 30s and having their own families. Kevin and I both talk about this, trying to develop strategies to cope with the increasing feeling we are loosing our closest friends.
I wanted to use the last day of #NIAW to share some pieces of art that reflect these feelings of loss. Many of our friends and family members post pictures of their family outings and announcements. In the height of my infertility, this would have enraged me. Now, with some years past, I am no longer angry but instead just deeply sad — knowing this will most likely not be our story, knowing that we are growing more and more distant with these friends and family members, knowing that there are days that its hard for me to recognize that deep desire I had to have a child. Below are some images I am using to create shadow boxes. I am trying to “play” on the other types of family photos that often fill my Facebook and Instagram feeds. The captions articulate the sentiment I feel in each of these images.
This photo was taken right when Kevin and I started realizing we were having trouble conceiving. We had been living in Cleveland and decided to make a trip back to Wisconsin to visit family. Here, I am pictured actually with my little brother. We are 18 years apart and when I would babysit him and take him to restaurants or run errands — people often assumed he was my child not my mothers. I think back to the times when I would carry him in his baby seat and think that is quite often the closest I will come to feeling like a mom.
I love this picture. While it looks like Kevin is holding a baby who just finished a bath, it is actually a cut out of him holding our new puppy — Mason. We had just picked up Mason from a farm in Southwest Michigan. He was smelly , dirty and had proceeded to throw up all over the car on the drive back to our house. We was so timid and tiny. Today, he is our 65 pound black lab. But he remains so gentle and eager to please. His presence in our life has made our whole navigation of infertility so much more bearable.
This picture was taken in September 2013. I had just started my PhD program. Meanwhile, a friend of mine from my MA program had just had a baby. Kevin and I went over to their house to meet the newborn. I remember holding that baby and posing for that picture feeling so incredibly sad that we would never take our own family picture.
Lots of our followers and contributors to this project have a personal connection to the ART of IF. Many of you have either faced your own infertility journey, suffered from infant loss and/or even perhaps miscarriage. We love sharing pieces of art with the vibrant infertility community that exists in the world. Yet, our mission at ART of Infertility is also very much about expanding audiences – beyond the infertility community – to raise awareness and understanding about infertility, infant loss and miscarriage to a more general public.
Art workshops, we find, are an accessible, low-stakes activity that can help facilitate conversations about these topics of loss with others who may have little or no experience with the topic. Our event in Houston, TX last week is one such example of how we use the project to raise general awareness about the reflective power of making art with medical objects.
We made connections between art, poetry and medicine more apparent by participating in a Feminist Action Hour hosted at the annual College Composition & Communication Conference. This conference attracts a wide array of professors and graduate students teaching and researching writing at the collegiate level. For many of these attendees, their research and teaching interests pertain to social justice and interdisciplinary issues – such as communication practices between physicians and patients, gendered communicative experiences of medicine, and even tensions of being a mother/father while working in the academy.
Participants and materials at the Feminist Action Hour workshop in Houston, TX.
Given these diverse interests, the Feminist Action Hour hosts pedagogical workshops to create space for engaging and teaching about these important topics with our students and our colleagues. Examples from last year can be found here: http://cwshrc.org/newwork2015/
As a Writing and Rhetoric graduate student, Maria Novotny’s (project partner with the ART of Infertility) research examines the ways in which infertile men and women make meaning and share this meaning making through art and writing. Given this, Maria invited the ART of Infertility to participate in the workshop by making pieces of blackout poetry with medical consent forms.
Maria instructing participants and answering questions at the blackout poetry workshop in Houston, TX.
Why medical consent forms and why blackout poetry?
This workshop was inspired by the artwork of Jo C., one of our ART of Infertility participants. Jo created this beautiful piece of black out poetry, titled My Consent which she gave to us to share through our permanent collection. To learn more about the piece, you can read about it on Jo’s blog.
My Consent by Jo C.
Medical consent forms and treatment procedures serve as central technical documents, frequently studied as genres in professional and technical writing. Rhetorically these forms reinforce depersonalized medical practices and the greater public’s perceived objectivism of medicine/science.
Medical and feminist rhetoricians have increasingly called for shifting the object of study – beyond “how health and medical texts get produced” to inquiries examining “what embodied users bring to these encounters” as health artifacts (Scott, 2014; Bellwoar, 2012). This workshop serves as pedagogical moment attending to the embodied interactions between medical documents and the user/consumer of these documents.
What happened?
During the workshop participants were invited to select a consent form and a stencil. Consent form options included: a sperm donation form, a fertility treatment form, and a mental health form. Stencils included: a penis, a uterus, and a brain.
The ART of Infertility’s objective was to present the “trifecta” of infertility: mental health, men’s health and female health.
We then spent 15 minutes with groups making pieces of poetry. Many who participated described the activity as “meditative.” Some wanted to play with the idea of one consent form for one stencil – so they incorporated both a penis and uterus within a mental health consent form.
“signs, process, normal, mass. abnormal, expected, normal, normal, normal, not perfect, normal, abnormal, selection, best, abnormally, accident, prevent”
“attempt, understand, risk, arise, could be born, might also produce, agree, support, maintain, understand, Birth”
Special protections, conversation, medical record. Diagnosis, prognosis, release, release. Disclosure, all information. Health Care.
“special protections, documenting or analyzing, start, the, subject, allows, the patient, disclosure, invalidate, authorization, Address”
The workshop was well-received and allowed the ART of Infertility to talk about issues of infertility and loss to those who may not necessarily recognize the physical and mental weight such a diagnosis has on the body.
If you would like the ART of Infertility to host a blackout poetry workshop (or another art/writing workshop), you can contact us at: info@artofinfertility.org
Today’s artwork is from Kristin Phasavath. We originally met Kristin at RESOLVE, the National Infertility Association’s, Southern California Walk of Hope in Long Beach in September of 2014 where we set up an appointment for her to be interviewed and photographed for the project. Kristin has a unique perspective because she was first a nurse at a fertility clinic and then, while working there, experienced secondary infertility and was a patient herself. Here, she shares her experience creating the oil painting, “Fertility Tornado”, which debuted at our pop-up exhibit in Calabasas during National Infertility Awareness Week in 2015 and has been traveling with us since. We’re preparing to send the painting back to Kristin and are grateful we’ve had so much time with it to share it with others. Below is a guest post that Kristin wrote for us and we originally shared in May of last year. Thanks for sharing your story with us, Kristin!
Elizabeth
Fertility Tornado
Fertility Tornado by Kristin Phasavath. Oil on canvas.
Kristin with her oil painting, “Fertility Tornado,” and her project portrait at the ART of Infertility pop-up exhibit in Calabasas, CA on April 25, 2015.
By Danielle Bucco
Growing up, little girls are always told that their Barbie dolls are the true example of ideal feminine beauty. Barbie represents this idea of ageless, timeless beauty that sets a certain type of standard for women to try to fit. Society starts to believe that women should look like a Barbie doll to be considered beautiful and anything less is not good enough. This week’s artist, Andrea Diamond, wanted to create something that touches on how society views Barbie and tie in her own experiences as well. As someone who is dealing with infertility in her own way she found this Barbie Doll work of art extremely therapeutic.
Andrea started struggling with secondary infertility after the birth of her first child. She believes that she started to notice time having an effect on her appearance as well as the decline of her internal organs. As she realized her chances of having another child were becoming more challenging, she felt the need to take her anger and aggression out on the timeless perfection that Barbie represents. By mutilating Barbie, she is demonstrating how she feels inside and how she is, ”no longer preparing my body as a sacred vessel that will create life.”
This work of art was a way for Andrea to express the many emotions that come with infertility. She felt as if nature betrayed her so she was going to do the same to Barbie and demonstrate just how much pain and anger she is in. Since nature had taken away her ability to create a child she felt as if nature was going to take away her outer beauty as well. This is one of the many examples of people who have found solace through art and use it as a type of therapy and to express their story. Learn more about the artwork through Andrea’s own words here: Diamond_Andrea
At the RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association Tri-State Walk of Hope last weekend in New Jersey, we brought out our “Infertility is…” cards again and asked those in attendance to share their thoughts. When I was looking through them this week, the first thing that popped into my head about my own experience with Infertility is how it’s brought so many amazing people into my life. We had a chance, after corresponding via phone and email with them over the past year or so, to finally meet some of those amazing people in person at the Walk.
There are too many to count, and I don’t get to keep in touch with most as often as I would like. However, each of the people I have met along this journey mean so much to me. There are those who share their stories with the project, reminding me that I’m not alone in my journey. There are late night exchanges of advice with support group friends via Facebook messenger and emails from people around the world sharing art they have created during their infertility journeys. There are the doctors and other infertility professionals who have opened their doors to us to learn more about the project and those sharing their time and talents with the ART of Infertility community by presenting art and writing workshops. I’ve found an amazing network of incredible people, passionate about their desires to build their families, and passionate about helping others do the same.
So, this week, I’m sharing some of the new cards from the walk with you and asking you, my infertility friends, to share with us what “Infertility is” to you. What makes the experience so hard? What are the silver linings? Is there anything surprising that has come out of your experience? One of my favorite, surprising, outcomes of the ART of Infertility project is having the opportunity to connect the friends I meet along the way to each other so they can build a bigger network of support.
Is there anything else you feel you need extra help with or support for that we could help you with? Are there things you would like to see ART of Infertility offer that we don’t currently? We’d love to hear from you, our friends in infertility and art!
Elizabeth
Maria and I attended the Examined Life Conference at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in April of this year and were invited to have some work from ART of IF on display there. It was an inspiring few days and, on the drive home to Michigan, we had the idea to put together some art packs that we could hand out at Advocacy Day. We figured if people had all the supplies they needed to create a piece around their experience with infertility, it would make it easy for them. We loaded envelopes with a mini canvas, paint, mod lodge, feathers, beads, anatomical drawings and more.
However, while everyone was very excited to receive their packs, it’s been a few months and we haven’t seen too many creations in our mailbox. We understand the process of creating art can be daunting, even when you have supplies on hand. It’s something that Maria has been struggling with and wanted to share her thoughts about here. Hopefully her words will resonate with those of you who still have art packs sitting around and explain how, even if you’re not feeling very artsy, the process of creating can still be beneficial in your journey. Click on the link below the picture to view the video that Maria has created.
Elizabeth
I’m constantly amazed by the opportunities for meeting those dealing with infertility, and helping them on their journey through art and story telling, that ART of IF is allowing me as the project grows. One upcoming opportunity is to present a prayer flag art workshop at the Revive Your Baby Making Mojo retreat in Ben Lomond, CA. Ben Lamond is located in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where the Redwoods meet the ocean. Sounds awesome, right?! It’s an incredible experience any time there’s an opportunity to get together with others living with infertility so I hope you’ll consider joining me in California to create some art around your infertility experience. There’s still room at the retreat and it’s an amazing value ($197 includes food, lodging, and all activities when you register by September 1st) with a great line up. This event is being hosted by Renee Waggener of Xtraordinary Fertility October 2-4. Maria and I met Renee at RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association’s Advocacy Day this year and she is sharing as our guest blogger this week. Thanks, Renee, for inviting ART of IF to share through art making at your retreat and for sharing with us through your blog post this week!
Elizabeth
My Spiritual Awakening
I just got done listening to 13 speakers in the Meditation your way to Millions Master Class lead by one of my super hero’s Lisa Cherney. It was awesome. Each speaker gave away super cool tools and insight into what “spiritual Practice” has lead to their business success. I found so many parallels in how you integrate your spiritual habits into building a business with how each of us builds a family. This sooo doesn’t surprise me, because the same section or chakra of our bodies… the root chakra is all about “Creation”. Whether it’s a creation of a business or we are creating a baby thru our bodies or adoption… we still need a spiritual “Practice” to help each of these succeed.
I’ve never really tooted my own spiritual horn because I really believe that we each need our freedom to choose for ourselves what works for each of us. And one of the things that really hit me in the summit is that I need to start speaking more from my heart when it comes to spirit and the message that I’m spreading with Fertility. I believe deeply that each of us is surrounded by a team of angels, guides, God, Universe, Mother Earth… and sometimes I call all of that “Spirit”. You call it what feels right for you.
My personal spiritual practice has gone in waves through the years. Sometimes I do something and sometimes I don’t, which is when I’m hiding or scared to connect.
This past year, I’ve put into practice a journaling exercise that I’ve been consistent with and it has opened me up to more possibilities, new relationships and deeper growth on my own personal purpose path in helping all of you in the fertility community.
Now that I’ve listened to these awesome speakers and what they do; I’ve realized it’s time to step up my practice. This is so much more than thinking positive, or prayer. It’s building a life practice that will not only help me help you, but more than that it will deepen my connection to spirit, give me more confidence to “Let Go of the outcome” (harder to do) and Really Trust in the process so that I can reach more people and help them (YOU) have babies and ultimately live a Fertilicious Life well into parenthood.
With that I really want to give to you today’s tips:
Knowledge is Power. There are many treatment options available for your infertility, so the more you know about each procedure will help you to make an empowered decision for you and your partner. There’s no one size fits all solution here. Don’t compare your decision based on what others do. Also, when you do the research, you don’t have to make a decision right away. Let it sit and let your intuition guide you on your “next best” choice.
Tick-Tock. Determine how long you will try to conceive. Being on the same page as your partner is important and you should agree on this. There is no right or wrong decision here. Choose a reasonable length that is comfortable for you and your partner. Also, know that this can be subject to change at anytime. Maybe even schedule in some breaks to where you are NOT thinking of your fertility.
Cha-Ching! Determine how much money you are willing to spend on treatment. As you may already know, fertility treatments can be costly. It’s important for the health of your relationship to determine how much money you are willing to part with. Again, this number will be different for each couple. It has to work for you! Also, look at your relationship with money. Do you have some beliefs around money that inhibit you? (I.e. I’m broke all the time = I’m unworthy) Notice this, then call me because I can help with this at the Revive Your Baby Making Mojo Retreat October 2-4.
I look forward to seeing if this touched you at all. Please post a comment on FB if it did.
With Peace and Light,
Renee
We’re featuring artwork from the project’s permanent collection in this week’s blog post. Marissa McClure has created this piece, s/m/othering, in which she has removed the babies, children, and reproductive organs from well known pieces of art. She then invites others to choose an image that speaks to them and share their reaction to the image by pasting it, along with their narrative, in a book.
We’ve been traveling with the book and it’s been in Iowa City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Northern California with us so far. We’re sharing some images and stories from the piece this post and you can look for us, and the book, at our upcoming events in New Jersey, Michigan, California, Illinois, and Arizona where we’ll invite you to share your own story through Marissa’s piece, mini interviews and photo sessions, and some other fun interactive projects we have planned.
You can read Marissa’s complete paper on s/m/othering at this link. Thank you, Marissa, for sharing your art with us!
