Giving birth

Canadian artist Amanda Greavette is a La Leche League leader and a member of “Friends of Muskoka Midwives,” one of the few midwifery advocacy consumer groups in Ontario. She loves to attend births for family and friends–and to paint pregnant and birthing women. She asked friends to send her photos of their pregnancies and deliveries, from which she  created a series of paintings for The Birth Project. She says:

“The Birth Project is a series of life-size figurative paintings of women, and specifically women experiencing the transition to motherhood.  I’m interested in how women navigate the dramatic process of childbearing and how it shapes and changes their identity.  I aim to create work that is provocative, beautiful and heavy with emotion and symbol.  The paintings represent an intensely personal but simultaneously universal and ageless experience.  Much beauty and drama is lived through a woman’s body, in ways that can be both empowering and debilitating.”