A film by Helen Sargeant & Krishna Francis, March 2015.
The film utilises 215 intimate family photographs and home video footage taken by the artist, together with autobiographical prose that weaves a journey through Helen’s thoughts, feelings and experiences of breastfeeding.
Helen narrates the film from a rocking chair. The sound and movement of the chair links together the story and the photographic imagery and also suggests the rhythmic flow of the milk sustaining the suckling baby. The breast feeding is an anchor, as all life goes on around, the chair acts as a metaphor for a boat that is moored or the body of the mother trapped in a perpetual domestic sea.
When making this work Helen was thinking about the slow duration felt when feeding and caring for a young baby or child at home. Of 1970’s children’s TV programmes such as Bag Puss, The Clangers and Jackanory. The work has been inspired by a wide range of sources from Tracey Emin’s How it Feels, through to Tarkovsky’s The Mirror and the opening breast feeding scene in Michel Ocelots animation of The Princes Quest.
