‘no babies, no boobs, no bumps’: Lyndsay Mann in Conversation with Calum Neill

​​Lyndsay Mann’s ​​​​​​As You Were 2024 is an experimental documentary structured around conversations​ with ​seven​​ ​midwives and obstetricians working in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS)​ about their own experience of giving​ birth. These ​conversations​ make up​ much of ​the film’s voiceover, while the imagery shifts between three visual registers: drone footage of a coxed women’s rowing team navigating a canal (fig.1); footage of Mann and her young daughter in conversation as they examine insect life (fig.2); and images of the artist’s hands ​inspecting ​historical obstetric and midwifery instruments (fig.3).​​​

​​​As You Were emerged from a practice that interrogates the intersection between the individual and the institution, ‘where claims of objective knowledge meet lived experiences and community expertise’.1 The central institution of Mann’s enquiries might shift – in her film A Desire For Organic Order 2016, for example, the artist explored nativeness and belonging using the Herbarium collections at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh – but her interest in the voice of the individual within it remains.2 In As You Were these voices are framed by the institution in many senses – more generally, by the institution of medicine, and more specifically, by the NHS and its structural practices, as well as by the physical buildings of the health service. The film’s title, a command instructing soldiers to relax and resume their original activity, both hints at the military institution and alludes to the change of self that can occur when having children.

In her conversation with Calum Neill, ​​Professor of Psychoanalysis and Continental Philosophy at Edinburgh Napier University, Mann describes her conscious editorial decision to include ‘no babies, no boobs, no bumps’, ​both to prioritise women’s lived experiences over the change to their bodies and ​to distinguish the subject of being pregnant and giving birth from that of being a parent.3 This sets As You Were apart from feminist artworks about pregnancy and childbirth that foreground the body, such as Susan Hiller’s photographic series Ten Months 1977–9 ​(fig.4), which records the lunar months of the artist’s pregnancy with images of her growing abdomen, or Catherine Elwes’s film There is a Myth 1984 ​​​​(fig.5), which shows an engorged lactating breast being massaged by a baby’s hand. These works place the reproductive and nurturing female body at their centre, seeking to train a lens on a body that was, at the time​ these artworks were made​, hidden in popular culture.4

​​In contrast to such works, As You Were is closer in approach to Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document 1973–9 (fig.6, Tate T03925​​), which records the development of the mother-child dyad through text, mark-making and objects, in a way that is all about bodies, ​​without depicting them. ​The work tracks the developmental stages of Kelly’s son, including growth, feeding, toilet training and linguistic mastery. Using the tropes of conceptual art, Kelly presents an apparently objective and scientific view of her son’s progress over the first six years of his life, with detailed texts and charts that resemble those of a paediatrician or health visitor. On closer reading, Kelly’s voice as a mother comes through, mapping her own experience of seeing her son become independent and no longer reliant on her or her body.

​​Like Kelly, Mann is interested in creating space between images of the maternal body and experiences of it. ​In As You Were the birthing body is referenced in the maternity instruments shown – forceps, cervical dilators, a surgeon’s knife – moving the discourse away from a single body to a more generalised sense of the body in a medical context. The act of labour is also referenced obliquely through the exertion of the female rowers as they work together to reach a goal. The cox urges them onwards with words that might be uttered by a midwife supporting a woman through labour – ‘just relaxing through the knees’, ‘finding that rhythm together still’, and ‘really confident, definite movements for this’​ (fig.7).

​​​​​​Likewise, in As You Were t​he connection between ​subject matter and imagery is never​ made explicit: this metaphorical work is left up to the viewer. And such associations will be highly individualised, depending on the life experiences of each viewer. ​​​Mann’s editorial style, which echoes ‘bricolage’ techniques employed by filmmakers such as John Akomfrah, creates a generous and generative space for association and metaphor.5 ​As such, Mann’s approach is also a feminist one –​ inviting​ multiple voices and viewpoints in a way that contests a documentary style that uses a single authoritative​​​, and often​ male, voiceover. Mann ​​​​​asserts ​that rather than a single narrative, there are many, and while they come from places of experience and expertise, they might also contradict each other.​ And i​​​​​​n pacing the voices in relation to the visuals,​​​​ using moments of silence and interweaving the dialogue,​​ Mann creates a space for the voices of the women she ​​talks to​​,​​​​​​ while also ​​making time for the audience to absorb ​​what they say​.

​​​Mann’s oblique approach here​​ is in line with a reflection by the writer W.G. Sebald on​ ​Virginia’s Woolf’s essay ‘The Death of the Moth’, which describes the last moments of the insect’s life on a windowpane as displaying ‘something marvellous as well as pathetic about him’.6 Sebald notes that Woolf wrote these words at a moment in history ‘between the battlefields of the Somme and the concentration camps’ when she ‘was greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the damage it did to people’s souls’.7 Her essay describes none of this explicitly but is infused with its pathos. As Sebald says, ‘a subject which at first glance seems quite far removed from the undeclared concern of a book can encapsulate that concern’.8

As the following conversation reveals, Mann wished at the outset to use the filmmaking process to explore the interplay between personal experiences of childbirth and the professional practices of clinicians working in midwifery and obstetrics. The film creates space to think about the way in which the inheritance of historical practices or influence of embodied knowledge are not direct and unambiguous. Relations between professionals and patients can be contested and even self-censored, often due to the ​​​​institutional context within which the clinicians work. In the film, we hear one woman describe the way in which she hid her pregnancy at work for as long as possible and chose to give birth in a different city away from her colleagues for fear of judgement (fig.9). Later in the film, another woman reflects that ‘even speaking to you I feel like I’m having to edit how I speak. I think midwives do that, I think we’re very fearful of saying the wrong thing. “What if it gets misconstrued?” I suppose is what a lot of midwives think’. This guarded, staccato style is threaded through the way in which all the female clinicians think and communicate. The embodied knowledge of birth that they each carry is thus woven into the structures of professional practice and institutional norms in ways that are partial, indirect and sometimes even contradictory. Lines between mothers-as-professionals become tangled and knotted. This is not to say their experiences of childbirth are unimportant to their professional practices, but that such experiences can complicate rather than clarify.

Calum Neill: As You Were is billed as a documentary, and yet it doesn’t play that standard documentary move of trying to construct a very fixed argument that essentially tells the viewer what to think and to be drawn along by that. Rather you present numerous different positions and juxtapositions. And the film also confronts that idea in numerous places of imposition and intrusion. And it seems to me as a film that it’s conscious of how it’s intruding. It’s not trying to impose, while at the same time it is a film: it is presenting us with information, with images which have been carefully selected. So I wonder if you could talk about how you make those choices and how conscious you were as a filmmaker of the fact you’re dealing with a very sensitive issue, which people can take in numerous different ways?

Lyndsay Mann: That’s built into the method of making the film. I wanted to talk about embodied experiences and people who had personal experience of pregnancy and birth. And I wanted to get a range of voices so that it didn’t sound like there was a single narrative or a single experience. I was keen to talk to women who were working in women’s healthcare – it’s increasingly women clinicians working in women’s healthcare. There was definitely a sense of thinking about this lineage that some of the obstetricians and midwives talk about in the film, which is a paternalistic lineage, a patriarchal lineage, which often does have a fixed view and comes from outside. So it was about speaking to people with personal experience of the field of medicine they’re working in and what that does. I was mindful of the fact that it is a film and I have a position, and I undertook the film to learn more from people, from specialists who have a different experience​,​ a different skill set and a different specialism from myself.

There are scenes in which ​​​​you hear ​me and ​my daughter talking or see her hands interacting with insects (figs.​2 and ​​8)​​​​​, which I include to situate my role and keep reminding the viewer of an author, to keep bringing it back to the fact that I have a voice in this. Obviously once you ​​record​ people, you can still direct how you want them to sound and I’m very mindful of that. I have a huge respect for what midwives and obstetricians do, and for the difficulty with which they found talking about these subjects. Quite a few were nervous that it was potentially unprofessional to be talking about their personal experience in a film that was also about professional and institutional practice. I think they enjoyed the challenge to an extent, but I then felt a responsibility to them in the edit, which also needs ethical consideration in a non-fiction work. I think trying to open up a conversation and not have a single view is very much a feminist approach.

Calum Neill: How so?

Lyndsay Mann: I think of it as a more polyvocal approach. Bringing many voices together is a way to do that. The reason I’m so interested in voice is that it’s a very unstable material, in that it can often give you away – my voice might crack, or I might sound nervous. It can relay information beyond my control. I think of that as bringing in a form of uncertainty. A dominant idea in culture is that to be in a position of authority, you must be steady, you must be sure, you must speak with certainty. And that’s often the male voice in filmmaking – the singular, certain, male voiceover. It’s not just certain in that it’s rehearsed, so that there’s no crack in the voice, no wavering or emotion in the voice, it’s also in the content. It has certainty in what it shares. It has a very specific position. For me, taking a feminist approach is embracing uncertainty, enjoying the instability of the voice and its material qualities, ​​while ​also holding authority – so having professional knowledge and understanding of a subject, ​while ​bringing personal experience into the conversation. I’m not trying to work against the idea of the specialist but rather it​’​s possible to ​have specialist knowledge ​and express uncertainty.

Someone that has really influenced my thinking around this is Trinh T. Minh-ha, who is a filmmaker and post-colonial theorist. She writes that something can only really be political when it doesn’t let itself be easily stabilised, and where there’s no single source of authority.9 And I find that very convincing. She says we have to be very careful that we’re not just shifting one account for another account – she calls for a destabilisation of the very notion that there is an authoritative account. Working with myriad voices, embracing the materiality of the voice, and asking people in their professional context to articulate their personal experiences is for me a way to destabilise. And then what happened in this film is​​ that​​​​ there was also the institutional, which was this third element.

Calum Neill: You said in going in to make the film that you wanted to learn. It sounds to me that part of what you’re trying to find out is how the context of childbirth has been institutionalised and has become professionalised. Can you say a little bit more about what the motivating questions were for you?

​​Lyndsay Mann: Yes, I think so. I do mention one in the film, which was after my own​ pregnanc​​ies​ ​and ​​my ​experience of ​​giving ​​birth ​​in an institutional contex​t​​ – ​​​so​ across NHS maternity services​. I​ ​realised afterwards that I had only really dealt ​​with women and I couldn’t think of another experience ​where I had only dealt with women in an institutional context, ​and I wondered what that meant. I wondered how that shifted the dynamics of interaction and if there was a feminist​ position ​in ​​these forms of interaction​, ​​between ​​the ​​professionals​​ themselves, and between professionals​​ and patients ​​within women’s healthcare. ​And also, I’m an artist and I’ve worked in the art world for a long time. It’s still very much considered a niche topic, pregnancy and birth, and so I had that irritation with me. I was an academic at the time, I was working in a ​university​, and I didn’t find it an easy experience thinking about having a child or being pregnant or trying to return to work after I had my daughter in that institutional context. I wondered if there was a place where this experience of pregnancy and birth is seen as having a value within ​​​​institutional structures rather than being ​perceived as ​an inconvenience. And I thought if it was going to happen anywhere maybe it would have value in the actual maternity ward where this experience happens. Rather than an inconvenience or a period of not being as focused or all these other stereotypes of what it means to be pregnant or return to work after giving birth, there might be a different framework for that experience.

Calum Neill: But it comes across in the film that that’s not a unilateral value. You might make that assumption that going into something like midwifery that it helps to have been through the experience yourself, but then the midwives and obstetricians who are talking in the film are not quite sure what to do with that experience once they have it.

Lyndsay Mann: Yes, and that was super interesting. One of the consultants talks about the fact that she’s witnessed some of the least helpful care coming from someone who has had a difficult birth experience themselves, and they managed it. And so then if someone else is having a difficult birth experience there’s an attitude of ‘if I can do it, you can do it’, which is something I hadn’t imagined in advance. So many of these experiences I hadn’t imagined. And that’s what I was curious about. And then, other experiences where patients had wanted their clinician to have shared the experience that they were about to go through and that gave them confidence. And what that means. So there was just so much more complexity behind the personal experiences that drive the professional practice and the forms of interaction that are happening in the room. Often the scientific-medical frame of Western medicine is this idea that it’s an objective practice, and that’s clearly not the case. Not just in women’s healthcare, but in any situation. And this was an opportunity to address that directly.

Calum Neill: The idea of medicalisation comes across very strongly for me particularly in the juxtaposition between the interviews and the images that are playing behind or alongside them. The idea that something that we might imagine is very natural, whatever that means, has become something very institutionalised and medicalised – and I’m thinking outside the film now – is presented as the only way​ ​… how else could you do this? Even now, the increase in people wanting to have home births is seen as something slightly risky. And the normal thing to do, which is actually this absolutely abnormal thing to do, is to go to a huge building and enter into this clinical context. Is that something that was overtly present for you in the work of making the film? This idea, this navigating the ​​​​institutional in terms of the institutions, like the NHS and the institution in the bigger sense of medicine per se and the personal somehow getting lost within that.

Lyndsay Mann: I’m really interested in how the norms of a culture are set up. I think they shift really quickly, as with that idea that the norm is to go into hospital. But also the norms within the hospital of what is understood as a regular practice or ways of interacting and how that all works. So the NHS and the university are both gargantuan institutions yet made up of individuals who are practising with this very rigid structure in place. And so my interest is in how small cultures within departments and within groups of people become enacted. So part of it comes from an historical lineage of the specialism and then how these start to shift. These small changes start to happen – or sometimes big changes – and how they come from the structure and then filter down to create a set of cultures that become the norm very quickly, that often are not intended outcomes or noticeable as individual elements. Part of it was thinking about what that means, how to unpack that.

I’m interested in the relationship between what you bring to your work, your personal belief system and set of values and how these are performed when you’re working within an institution that has its own culture. Barbara Duden calls it a ‘thought collective’, the way in which norms of behaviour and practice come to be formed at any particular moment in time.10 These three things appeared during the making of As You Were – the institutional, the personal and the professional. And going in I hadn’t seen them as three, I’d seen them ​​as two​ ​​ – the personal and the professional. ​It came mainly from the midwives who spoke about the institution as a​ separate​ element of practice. ​​I think that was partly because their professional training is quite difficult to perform within an institutional setting​. ​​Some in the film and others I met described an ethics of care and practice that they learned​​ while​​ studying and training in midwifery that they carry​​ ​​with them, even if they’ve left the profession. For example, a lecturer I met who has been out of clinical settings for years yet still identifies primarily as a midwife because for her it articulates a set of values that she takes pride in. My understanding is that due to the operational realities of the NHS, it’s not always possible to enact best practice for the patient. ​So they’re trained one way, but then when you practise that training within an institutional setting, it’s not the same. You can’t operate in the way that you’ve been taught is the best practice.

​​Calum Neill: One of the obstetricians talks about patriarchy in the film. Some of the images you choose seem to chime with or to support that patriarchal notion that comes across very strongly in the film, that within the medical institution, there’s a gender difference, not in terms of the people, but in terms of the institutional practices. So you have these midwives who are predominantly female having to operate within what is, on the whole, a much more male-driven or has been a male-driven institution. Is that something you expected going into it?​​​

Lyndsay Mann: Yes, because in every institution I’ve worked, I’ve experienced that. I couldn’t think of an institutional lineage that isn’t patriarchal. And so I imagined it would be there, and it was very clearly something I wanted to talk to the women about. I didn’t anticipate it with the obstetric instruments. The film came out of an earlier project called ​​​​New Mothers’ Assembly 2019​ (​fig.​10)​​.​ ​F​irst-time new mothers with a child under one year were invited to come to Surgeons’ Hall Museums Edinburgh, along with their babies, and we had midwifery and obstetric instruments from the ​museum’s ​collection​s​ in the room with the women. ​​​​​The ​first forceps that come on screen​ in As You Were (see ​​fig.9​),​ that are leather bound, they were in the room​ at New Mothers’ Assembly​. They’re from 1760, I think. One of the women couldn’t believe​, ​she said, ‘they look exactly the same as the ones that were used on me three months ago’. That understanding of a technology not moving forward in 250 plus years​;​ these objects speak of the lineage of the institution. I think that’s one of the reasons I’m so interested in archives, and particularly in objects that relate to the body. What they talk about is how the body was thought about, or not thought about.​ ​​T​hat’s what these objects do.

Calum Neill: One of the things that struck me in the film was the lack of bodies. You think of childbirth, and the whole thing is about the body or about bodies, and yet you made a choice not to include them. There are some bodies – primarily small animals and people’s hands and the rowing team. But largely the film is absent of bodies. How did that work ​for ​you ​in terms of your construction of the film?

Lyndsay Mann: Part of it was a decision and part of it was circumstance. I knew I didn’t want any birth scenes. I knew I didn’t want any pregnant bodies. I didn’t want any breastfeeding. I think I said, I had this no babies, no boobs, no bumps idea in my head going into making the film. There’s a lot of work that explores the aesthetics of pregnancy and birth and I find that really valid, but I also find often that it can be weaponised as reductive, as if, because pregnancy and birth are such physical processes – you’re literally growing and then expelling – that to focus on the physical doesn’t take account of the political shift that happens, the psychological shift that happens, the behavioural shifts, the way people perceive you and the way you perceive the world. It doesn’t talk about any of that. ​I​t can bring it once again back to a women’s topic about women’s bodies. I was trying to think how to move beyond the types of conversations I’d had around pregnancy and birth before, where it’s considered a niche topic. I feel like it couldn’t be more universal. ​​When we see in America, reproductive rights being reversed and we see women and children being targeted in Palestine to limit a generational future of a people. It really doesn’t get more foundational than that and more universal than that.

And so I thought, if I can keep the physical out of it, how do I represent that? I thought about the historical instruments, and how they talked about the body and how it has been thought of or not thought of historically. ​T​hen also, the people working with the bodies, maybe they can speak to it. ​T​hey have bodies themselves. If I can find people who have been through this experience – they’ve experienced a pregnant body. The idea was originally to be in the room with the instruments (​fig.12). That’s why there are eight objects on the counter and there are eight women’s voices in the film​ (seven medical practitioners and myself)​. The​ initial ​idea was ​to have​ four midwives and four obstetricians similarly, who had experienced pregnancy and birth and they would talk to each other at Surgeons’ Hall Museums using these objects to talk about their practice and as a conduit for different conversations.​

But then COVID happened and we couldn’t all be in the room together. And so, it was on hold for a couple of years. When we finally filmed in the museum, there could only be myself and Minttu Mäntynen, the camerawoman, in there. We had masks on. The archivist, Louise ​​Wilk​i​e, was bringing the objects, putting them down on a tray and then leaving the room so that there were only two of us in the room at one time. The conversations were all conducted by phone, by video call, or at the​​ ​Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh​​,​ walking and talking outdoors. I still felt I had this real responsibility, that these women had given me their time and been very honest about very intimate experiences that they found difficult to talk about. I just didn’t want to let it slip away, so I asked myself how we could make the film some other way.

​​Calum Neill: The first time I watched the film, my favourite bit, or perhaps what really struck me​ ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​was your daughter, when you’re looking at the ants, and your daughter says, ‘this is so cool, would you be sad if you’d known how cool it was and you hadn’t seen it?’ ​Which is a really interesting question that I think only a child could have asked. There’s an anticipation of a regret for something that didn’t happen and listening to you talk just now, would you have been sad now seeing how cool the film is if you hadn’t made it the way you’d made it?

Lyndsay Mann: That’s my favourite question! Totally. I am really happy with the way it’s made. Something that I hadn’t fully appreciated was how much the women felt comfortable talking because it could be anonymous, because they didn’t have to be on camera. So I think there was much more honesty, particularly around the institutionalisation of practice. One woman in the film even says, ‘I’m not even super comfortable saying this’. And that came up quite a lot. There was this sort of double-check that it was definitely anonymous. I guess maybe that’s partly built into a medical approach or part of the discipline of respect​ing priva​cy​​.​​

Calum Neill: With the film ending up being made the way it was made because of the constraints of the world, of the situation, did that then lead to all the fantastic images? You’re not going to have the midwives and the obstetricians in the film so you’re going to use other images. It seems to me that you’re using a lot of images from nature. You juxtapose the institution, institutional ideas, medicalisation, the images of the forceps with the images of nature. Then we come to very specific images of nature you choose. The spider to me (fig.​13​), immediately says Louise Bourgeois, particularly in this context, since for Bourgeois the spider is analogous with the mother (fig.1​4​). And the bees, the ants ... I’m not an expert on this but my understanding is those ants would be worker ants, which are all female ants. So are these very conscious choices that you’re making as a filmmaker?

Lyndsay Mann: Mostly they’re conscious, that’s why they’re in the film. The connection with Bourgeois is serendipitous. Maman 1999 (Tate T12625) is an important work to me, and she is an important artist to me because she was one of the very few visible artists ​as a​ mother, which was very unusual in her generation. With the ants, I wasn’t thinking of female worker ants when I filmed it. It was really just that my daughter wanted me to see something cool. And then I realised that it could really work in the film. I definitely wanted to move from inside to outside in terms of being in these institutionally lit spaces to daylight. Very early on I had the drone image in my head. I was looking for ways that the camera could move in close and move further out. In the scenes of the rowers​ (​see figs.1 and​ ​7)​, I wanted the close-up sounds – each rower and the boat were separately mic’d – with the far away image, thinking about objective and subjective positions. And then there are others where the instruments are filmed up close and personal, which are very cold and hard but I wanted the camera close which would be more of an intimate, sensory shot. A lot of the scenes of nature come from my caring responsibilities at the time. I was in the company of a small child who walks close to the ground and notices insect activity, and so I began to notice these quiet practices. They create pacing. There is quite a lot of talking in the film. I was looking for ways to create space to absorb what’s just been said, time for people to process. Often people​ in the audience​ have a shared experience and it can be quite emotional to watch.

Calum Neill: I think that works really well. Those spaces, as you put it, to allow you to make your own associations. They’re not simply in the background, but they’re also associative, which allows your mind to make connections.

Lyndsay Mann: Yes. My hope in terms of the placement of the words and the images was that they would reference each other in some way. Some are more oblique than others. And I guess that’s a way of trying to situate the bigger conversations, which took a much longer form. I was thinking of how the images could perhaps share a little bit of what I perceived the person wanted to convey.

Calum Neill: The film opens and closes with the rowers, which to me brings up a really obvious metaphor there, of the canal, the birth canal. You could also go slightly deeper than that – the boat seems to echo with the instruments as well.

Lyndsay Mann: Oh in what way?

Calum Neill: Well, it looks very clinical, this sharp instrument ...

Lyndsay Mann: Yes, it’s very sharp.

Calum Neill: ... that’s being inserted into a canal, moving through the canal. It seems quite a peaceful image, the rowing. It’s a quiet sport and it’s a sunny day, the wind’s blowing in the trees and yet this very sharp hard instrument moving up the canal in the context of your film seemed to present this juxtaposition of something beautiful and something violent at the same time, which seemed to be a very strong echo throughout the whole film both on the natural side of things and in the institutional side of things.

Lyndsay Mann: I guess I hadn’t thought of it. I think you’re right, I’d agree with you. I had seen it as more peaceful. There’s definitely one scene where I’m very conscious of what you’re saying, which is when one of the obstetricians is talking about being splayed out on a table and cut open by her colleagues, and I wanted that shot where it looks like a view from above looking down on the table. What I pictured with the drone shot was this hierarchy of the medical gaze and this positioning was what I liked about the drone. And so I thought, that looks like a surgical table, and the water is this silver-grey colour. And she talks exactly about that cut and then this sharp object cuts across the screen. But I hadn’t so much seen it in other areas.

I was thinking of the rowers as a continuation, of constant motion and movement through the film, capturing the body being instructed, where to place your limbs, women working together in a team, the embodied sounds of breath and water. Rowing was a way to bring physical strength into the film and address these experiences beyond what seemed to be the boundaries of the subject. And then little things like, for me, the way that they were wiping down and cleaning the boat at the end (fig.15). I remember being wiped, it’s maybe a bit too visceral, but being wiped down and cleaned after birth. That looked very similar to me.