Birthing Tray - Eggs

Based on a print illustrating the birth of Julius Caesar included in an early modern manuscript of Roman history, Les Faits des Romains.

‘Dixie, while overlaying the stomach and child with the bowl of eggs, has actually increased the violence of the original. The surgeon is a sinister presence, almost a dark shadow wielding the phallic knife, while the midwife – now relegated to the role of assistant – has transmuted from a hag into the skeletal figure of Death.

A foreign land with exotic creatures is demarcated on the left of Birthing Tray – Eggs, while navigation and journeys of exploration are also invoked through the representation of a sextant on the right-hand side of the tray. The phallic projection of the sextant is in tension with the bowl of eggs, suggestive of ova, and it in fact reiterates the shape of the raised knife of the surgeon. Alluding to a discourse in which the journey of expedition was conceptualised as a male penetration into a female interior, the motifs included in the work also reveal how acts of imperialist discovery – like caesarean births – were implicated in gendered violence.’  (Extract from Figuring Maternity: Christine Dixie’s Parturient Prospects by Prof. Brenda Schmahmann, Dearte n75_a4)