Monika Dutta, 'Assisted Conception Unit, Kings College Hospital, London, 1998'
In: Artists-in-Research 1996-98. Edited by Alistar Raphael and Vicotria Clarke. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999, pp. 62-69.
The Assisted Conception Unit is one of many departments throughout Britain regulated by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Situated in South London on the eighth floor of a busy and oversubscribed hospital, the Unit has enabled hundreds of women to conceive through its In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) programme and is surprising on many levels. Instead of the clinical expectations that one might expect in terms of décor, are the pastel green, slightly grubby corridor walls covered with hundreds of pictures of babies sent in thanks to the hospital from grateful parents all over the world. There are a number of consultation rooms and a pokey room the size of a cupboard under the stairs where the scientific, delicate microscopic work goes on. It is here that sperm tails are trimmed and egg 'shells' are spliced. Sperm that is slow, low in count, or impaired is examined and aided in its quest to fertilise the egg.
Fluctuations in the balance between the increasing medical intervention into human biology and the debates about the parameters of these interventions are by definition ongoing, often emotional and very complex. Even far away from the 'sterile' and over hygienic environments of assisted reproduction, discussions about demographics, ageing populations, welfare services, future females roles and the place of childbirth continue to permeate the everyday in a myriad of ways. Very visible examples include Mandy Altwood, the young mother who conceived sextuplets after fertility at the unit. All six later died. Monika Dutta was given full access to the nursing staff and the Unit's labs; she was particularly drawn to items of equipment - test-tubes, petri dishes, pipettes and plastic tubes - which had been discarded and disposed of by the nurses.
....when I was younger I sided with those who believed that conception was a 'natural' biological process, not to be tampered with. My interests in feminist ideologies have led me through debates that articulate the female body as a territory colonised by (white male) scientists.
I am now thirty years old and still without children, although I do intend to reproduce at some point soon. Perhaps now I don't feel so strongly about those arguments we so carefully constructed on paper. The possibility of not being able to conceive 'naturally' is a real part of my consciousness and makes me now rethink what I believe about reproduction and the ethical issues regarding intervention.
How many of the women receiving treatment at the Assisted Conception Unit (ACU) have experienced such shifts in their personal/political viewpoints?
My intention during the residency is to investigate these complex relationships between individual identities outside the laboratory and the streamlined, efficient medical processes preformed within. I want to identify how women negotiate the territory where their bodies become laboratory materials, and where, with regard to the embryos, body and laboratory blur into one.
The above passage, taken from my original application to the research residency at the Assisted Conception Unit articulates a desire to rediscover a subject that I already had firm ideas about. However, I was prepared to have my opinions challenged by the perspective of an alternative position. I anticipated exchanges and opportunities for discussion with a range of people; people that I would not ordinarily have come into contact with. I wanted to witness individuals experiencing a technology that they may never have imagined would touch their lives.
I expected the residency would be fairly formal in its set-up and that my time in the Unit would be structured in agreement with individual staff members and myself. I expected formal introductions to key members of staff including the embryologists and patients as part of my research. Unfortunately this was not my experience during the residency. With insight I feel that inIVA thought it would be more appropriate for me to establish these structures and relationships with the staff in the Unit. As a result I felt that my research became very 'fly on the wall' because despite tentative attempts, I was unsuccessful in gaining direct access to, and input from, patients attending the Unit.
I did not want to find myself producing work 'about' new reproductive technologies or showcasing the practices and procedures that I had witnessed. Nor did I want to be endorsing or opposing the processes employed. In the end I spent much of my time undergoing a process of documentation. It was not until after I had bought and read a number of books concerning bioethics and reproductive technology that I was able to think about these technologies in wider contexts. This focused my approach and I was able to identify a main thread of investigation: an exploration of the fragmented nature of the female body which results from the sophisticated techniques used in imaging the body under the biomedical gaze. Boundaries are broken as the body's interior is displayed externally on video monitors, ultrasound screens and photographic images.
I see parallels in the way that I 'disappeared' in the laboratory and the way that art disappears into the closed world of the gallery or museum. The experience of being an artist outside of the insular studio-for-production/gallery-for-showing world that I had previously seen myself as operating in, has led to a shift in my own perceptions of how art functions. I am now looking to change my practice: not in terms of what I make or even how I make it, but in how I choose to display it in the world; the realms I choose in which it might function.
Since completing the research residency at the Assisted Conception Unit I have been living in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne working as Digital Artist-in-Residence for North Tyneside Arts. Although the brief has involved instigating and working on projects for community groups, the main impetus of the residency has been to explore and exploit the potentials of digital technologies within my working practice. Parallels between this technology and the biotechnologies of the Assisted Conception Unit have informed my thought processes and the work that I have produced during this period.