Catherine Elwes

Shot in 1983 on a Sony Portapak, With Child belongs to the first generation of works made possible by portable analogue video. The equipment was heavy and cumbersome, with ‘batteries like bricks,’ but it could go anywhere, and while other artists carried it up mountains or into demonstrations, Elwes brought it home. Working alone or with a single helper, she focused on ‘the long wait of pregnancy,’ using U-matic tapes of up to an hour to let its slow passage unfold in almost real time. For an artist trained in fine art, video felt close to drawing: its image could be watched live on a monitor, erased and re-recorded, a medium of trial and error well suited to a feminist project still discovering its own forms. In the early 1980s, pregnant bodies were almost absent from cinema and television and hidden under loose dresses in daily life. Alongside her works on menstruation and lactation, With Child was part of a wider effort by women to ‘wrest their experience from the realm of nature’ and give it a presence in the cultural space of art.