Caring Through Cloth: Textiles and the Trauma of Stillbirth

Abstract

The Caring through Cloth project links rituals of sensing, caregiving, and making with baby clothes and related textiles to adaptive coping in stillbirth loss. Stillbirth is traumatic because it (a) disrupts the natural order of life, (b) is an ambiguous loss, leaving little tangible evidence to validate or narrate it, (c) is a cultural taboo and stigma, disenfranchizing loss, personhood and parenthood and (d) can lead to complicated grief. As such mourning stillbirth is challenging both psychologically and socially. Blankets, baby clothes and soft toys feature in clinically based stillbirth rituals which promote physical contact, caregiving, and memory making. Textiles form part of memory boxes and are often used to assist personal rituals. Arts projects and charities gift or support the making of textile objects to aid those who grieve. Despite this, there is limited analysis of the significance of textiles to mourning stillbirth and little exposition of the theories of meaning which are employed. This study adopts a psychobiological understanding of art and uses Dissanayake’s Artification Hypothesis and Gibson’s theory of Affordance, to examine the role textiles play in mourning stillbirth. This paper (a) reviews literature and contextual sources and (b) uses auto and sensory ethnography to investigate the relationship between textiles and mourning stillbirth. It identifies that baby clothes and related textiles afford rituals of sensing, caregiving and making that can be used to artify and express, through analogy, the needs and cares of parents who have experienced stillbirth. These initial findings have informed the design of a Caring through Cloth workshop, which seeks to support parents in their adaptive coping and collect qualitative data to further assess the adaptive significance of sensing, interacting and making with textiles in arts-based activities.

Keywords:

• textiles
• trauma
• stillbirth
• mourning
• ritual
• artification
• adaptive coping

Acknowledgements

Lisa Porch would like to thank Lucy Turner, who runs the Still Parents project at the Whitworth, Manchester and Jo Richler, the Co-Chair of Manchester Sands who works in partnership with the Still Parents project, for all their support and guidance in the Caring through Cloth project.

Disclosure statement

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Additional information

Funding

Lisa Porch’s PhD studies have been supported by the Welsh Government’s Skills Priority Programme (SPP) and the Staff Development Fund (SDF) at Coleg y Cymoedd.

Notes on contributors

Lisa Porch

Lisa Porch is a PhD candidate in the School of Art and Design at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She is also a textile artist and a lecturer at Coleg y Cymoedd and Hereford College of Arts. Her PhD research study entitled Caring through Cloth explores the relationship between textiles and adaptive coping in mourning stillbirth. [email protected]

Keireine Canavan

Keireine Canavan PhD is Principal Lecturer in Textiles, Subject Head of Textiles (2004-2019) at Cardiff Metropolitan University and leads the Sustainability Curriculum (+Research) for Cardiff School of Art & Design. As educator, weaver and Research Fellow of the Al-Sadu Weaving Society, Middle East, she consultants on endangered traditional weaving techniques and advises as visiting scholar on sustainable cultural heritage projects for national and international museums.

Cathy Treadaway

Cathy Treadaway PhD is Professor of Creative Practice at Cardiff School of Art and Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, and a founder member of the CARIAD research group. She is an artist, writer, and design researcher with a background in design and digital technologies. For the last 9 years she has been leading international interdisciplinary research investigating how to design for people living with advanced dementia.

Clive Cazeaux

Clive Cazeaux is Professor of Esthetics in the School of Art and Design at Cardiff Metropolitan University, Wales, UK. He is the author of Art, Research, Philosophy (Routledge 2017) and Metaphor and Continental Philosophy: From Kant to Derrida (Routledge 2007), and the editor of The Continental Esthetics Reader (Routledge 2011, 2nd edition). His research interests are esthetics from Kant to phenomenology, and the philosophies of artistic research, audio drama and metaphor, especially the role metaphor plays in the way we carve up the world and think.