 Mae'n ffraith gweithio'n gweithio'n gyfer I'm Able To Introduce Jody Day. I have known of Jody for some years being involved in the Gateway Network which has been very supportive to me. So it's a pleasure to meet in this context and as I mentioned Jody was very supportive and continually supportive of the project that I'm just undertaking next door in the next spring. felly diddiw galw cinnw. Jodie is the British founder of Gateway Women, the global advocacy and support network for childless women, which was founded in 2011. She is the author of Living the Life Unexpected, How to Find Hope Meaning and a FFulfilling Future Without Children, published by Pam McMillan. She was chosen as a UK digital one of the year in 2021. She is an internationally respected thought leader on female involuntary childlessness, o gyfweld, o gyfweld, o honi'r teadwyr, o erioed, o bwysigol, o bwysigol, o chymdeithasol o'r bwysigol ac o bwysigol yn dod i gyfweld, o chymdeithasol, o bwysigol yn ysgol. Mae'n gweithio ar hyn o'r ysgol a'r cyfnodol yma i fyfyddiadau newidol. I'n ymwysigol y gallu eich bod yn ei fffridd. So, yes, without any further, as they say, thank you so much, Jodie, for writing this especially for us, as so many have done, I feel like if we'd all got in a room together and decided what we were going to do, we couldn't have come up with anything more interrelated and more softly leaning into each other's presentation, so thank you very much, looking forward to this. So, rather like Pragia, I have one option, which is looking at my notes, so you're now blurred, which is quite good for my nerves, actually, so I've never used one of these before, looks reasonably simple, okay. So, I've called my talk The Presence of Absence, and first of all I want to say thank you to Melanie and to Katie from Tate St I's for curating this event and also to the Paul Mellon Centre for supporting it. I'm honoured to be included, although coming last in the line-up today, and yesterday's amazing and profound talks, a little daunted and as Melanie said, bit tired. Barbara Hepworth spent her life dedicated to creating art that expressed the interrelationship between the human form and the landscape, and in doing so she entered into direct physical relationship with stone and wood and metal, carving by hand in a way that was revolutionary for the early 20th century, and in doing so revitalised the practice of sculpture for the modern age. Her output was prolific, even that which survives, as much of her work was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War, and she did all this by bringing up four children through them, unexpected and very underweight triplets. It's exhausting to even write this, but to live it? As a childless, not by choice woman myself, I confess that Hepworth's own status as a mother, and the well-known association of her work with mother and baby forms, had unconsciously kept me away from her work. But being asked to give this talk challenged me to see beyond that, and I'm so very glad I did, as I found myself touched, moved and in some deeply meaningful ways seen by engaging with her work. Let me begin with an anecdote. About a month ago I was visiting a dear friend who was the mother of an intelligent, lively and artistic eight-year-old girl, the kind of child who used to haunt my own dreams of motherhood. However, for many years my friend like me had been thwarted in her desire for partnerhood and motherhood, and her daughter was a late and delightful addition to her life. In the decade that preceded her arrival, she too had often despaired of pronatalist and singlist aspects of the culture, as expressed by our friends and family, and in every representation of and idea of what it meant to be a real woman. Because despite the huge advances of feminism, if you get to your mid-thirties as a woman and you're not partnered and either childhood or soon to be, a cloud begins to hang over your head. And if you haven't sorted this out by your mid-forties, you're seen as beyond redemption by polite society and only fit to be the target of casually cruel memes like the crazy cat lady. I mean, where's the male version of that? And whispered stereotypes such as the spinster, career woman, hag or witch. If you think about it, the only positive term for a woman over 60 is grandmother. All the rest are slurs. The shaming of the childless woman is deeply embedded in our culture. Women who have chosen not to have children and who often use the term child-free to describe themselves experience this stigma too, still having freely chosen this identity. They do not seem to experience the depth of grief and shame that involuntarily childless women do and seem to have a much more robust sense of their own worth. I used to envy them, but these days having grieved the children that live only in my heart and unpacked intellectually the cultural forces of pronatalism that drip fed me the idea that I was a failure as a woman because I was not a mother. I too feel comfortable in my skin and identity because each of us were born childless and intrinsically worthy as human beings. My childlessness cannot be allowed to rob me or any childless woman of that dignity. So back to my friend's house and imagine my surprise when I walked into her house and saw pinned onto her kitchen notice board a postcard of Hepworth's mother and child sculpture from 1934. I was viscerally punched in the gut by this image, the way that the abstract form of the child balances with delight in the mother's lap and in turn is kept safe by the mother's hovering but unintrusive embrace and I felt my childless grief rise up in response. A clenching in my belly, the air in my chest thickening like treacle, a cocktail stick stabbed to the heart and a sudden blinking of my eyes, all sensations which I acknowledged internally but swallowed down socially. Because in this diminutive sculpture only 26 cm high and carved when Hepworth was pregnant by her partner and not yet second husband Ben Nicholson, she communicated the maternal reverie of imagining a future relationship with a child growing in her womb. It hit me that here was yet another item to add to the vast library of experiences my childlessness had forever put out of my reach. Neutrally, I pointed the postcard out to my friend mentioning my preparation for this talk and she glanced up at it momentarily. It was a thank you card from someone and the conversation moved on. I realised then that this iconic image of Hepworth's work, which would have been too evocative for her to display just a few short years ago, was now so normalised by her experience of motherhood that she no longer saw it through the eyes of childlessness. I do not wish to imply that my friend is unempathetic to my experience far from it. It's just that now that motherhood is part of her body, part of her daily life, part of her experience of what it is to be a woman, the image resonates differently. I will never be a mother, never have that conscious and unconscious lens on the world and that absence is universally seen as a deficit on my part. To use the sociologist Goffman's term from 1963 to be a childless woman is to have an internalised a spoiled identity and thus to be marginalised by regular society and to spend the rest of one's life managing that stigma. Mothers have their own very real challenges and I am empathetic and supportive of those but many of them are visible, acknowledged and there is a certain amount of permission to write and speak about them publicly. You only have to look at the heaving fertility, pregnancy and parenting shelf in any bookshop and compare it to the section on childlessness. If perhaps someone on the buying team has some personal experience, my book Living the Life Unexpected might be there or perhaps a book about the child free experience but usually there's absolutely nothing. And this is not something that reflects the weighting of our numbers. One in five women in the UK is reaching midlife without children, 10% by choice, 10% due to infertility and a whopping 80% childless by circumstance with the biggest circumstance being finding a willing and suitable partner during her potentially fertile years. That means that women without children represent 20% of midlife women. Double what it was for our mother's generation and those numbers are only set to grow over the next 15 years to one in four or even one in three. I titled my 2017 TEDx talk The Lost Tribe of Childless Women for exactly this reason except we are hidden in plain sight rather in some remote and far away place. Over the last decade whenever I've been in a social setting and a parent has asked me about my work, I've suggested to them that they probably know someone impacted by the issue of involuntary childlessness and after a moment of reflection every single person has been able to. A childless aunt whom the family never really talks about, a daughter in despair over the failure of her last ever IVF cycle, a co-worker returning from maternity leave without a baby, a granddaughter struggling to find a partner willing to commit to parenthood and running out of time, a childless couple dealing with adoption, rejection or breakdown, a quiet and slightly reclusive neighbour who lives alone in her 60s. We are everywhere, yet we have been invisible. The grief of childlessness is termed disenfranchised grief to use Doka's 1998 term and thus it is not socially acceptable to name, experience or even claim sympathy for it. We are present and we are everywhere in society, but we are mostly absent in people's thoughts and plans and because we do not slot into our families, social groups and communities with the ease that mother and children are able to, we are often unintentionally ostracised and devalued. To be a childless woman is to be a puzzle to others and often an enigma to ourselves. Whilst the former is not something we have much control over, the latter is something each of us will have to inquire deeply into if we are to find a way to live our lives meaningfully and purposefully. Without children there will be no shared childrearing project with our partner if we have one, no relationship to step into with our mothers when we are both mothers, no renewed bond with our siblings and friends as we parent the next generation together, no grandchildren for our parents to hopefully adore, no younger people around us to accompany us into our older years, no one to remember us when we are gone. To be childless can be terrifying which is probably why unconsciously people shun us. We represent something existentially raw and achingly vulnerable about the human experience. There is an inside and an outside to every form Hepworth once wrote and sometimes they are in special accord as for instance a nut in its shell or a child in the womb. But how does a woman who grieves for the children that live only in her heart hear the part about the nut in its shell when it is followed by the child in the womb? It can be a throwaway statement for a mother but to a childless woman it lands like a grenade. But after the explosion has impacted as with all aspects of my recovery from childlessness it's about digging below the rubble to find the deeper, more universal meanings of things and in doing so I have found my way in to Hepworth's work because if I can allow my heart to be pierced by her representations of motherhood as a symbolic concept rather than a purely biographical and biological experience I can feel beyond that to a place of deeper connection. Such an engagement requires on my part a willingness to open my heart and mind to the howling halls of loss and grief and yet to feel also how intimately those things are connected to love and hope. To be a mother is to walk this tightrope every day too. Perhaps we are not so different as the culture would make us out to be. Maybe sometimes absence is needed for presence. Whilst researching for this talk I found that Jeanette Winderson another writer, another non-mother in her case by choice also chose to write about the holes of life and that's H-O-L-E-S for an essay introducing Hepworth's work in The Take magazine in 2003. In it Winderson writes, look into a Hepworth hole and you are looking at what matter normally conceals everything that matter cannot express. I had not read this piece before I chose the theme of my talk today but I do wonder if the way that Hepworth's work seems to make tangible is some hidden mystery at the heart of life. Perhaps for some mothers made real by their experience of motherhood might be in part what unconsciously drew both Winderson and myself to this particular aspect of Hepworth's work. In 1943 in a letter to the art critic E.H. Ramston who had written appreciatively of Hepworth's work for the magazine Horizon, Hepworth wrote that the full flowering of sculpture must come out of doors with nature and a collective society. Here where people respect a stone in the field one gets the direct impact of man's spiritual reaction to sculpture. This is the whole stone in County Antrim in Northern Ireland. Those standing stones that Hepworth refers to have long fascinated me too and along with holes in them have a special significance in the local folklore of the British Isles. Some are associated with fertility, others with oath taking including marriage vows but all of their apertures, their portals are imbued with a symbolic significance by long tradition. Smaller stones like these ones, smaller stones like these ones with holes in can be found on beaches across the British Isles and are thought to have magical properties. Colloquially known as hagstones, historically they would have been carried as personal talismans against evil and specifically as protection against witches and other evil spirits. It is thought that only good things can pass through the hole so that whilst good fortune can find you bad things cannot. But even today in our more secular times they retain something of a talismanic quality and continue to be collected by those of us who feel they express something about the way that life isn't solid, that our plans are always subject to the vagaries of fate and that even solid rock can be pierced by grief, by loss. Whilst that is not a talk about folkloric belief I am intrigued by the associations of absence as represented by the holes in hagstones and monoliths, those voids within solid objects. And how they are read symbolically by the human mind as representative of other worldly forces to be respected. Notwithstanding the association of hagstones with two of the pejorative stereotypes at this day still attached to childless older women, hag and witch, here as in Hepworth's work the whole, the void, the absence is what gives life and meaning to the solid form. So might I be allowed as a childless woman as someone rejected from mainstream society's idea of what it is to be a real woman to claim the power and significance of absence for myself? After all, as I'm almost sixty and I'm content to own my hagnus or my hagetude as Sharon Blackie's book named it and if the meaning of witch is a powerful, wise, magical childless woman maybe I can step through the void and into that perhaps rather marvellous identity and to return to Hepworth's use of holes, voids and apertures as part of her work across her lifetime. Can I find myself in her work and in her mind too? Hepworth's 1963 sculpture Sphere within a Form is a progression on the mother and child theme and still punches me in the solar plexus but the abstraction of it allows me to engage with it more fully. Am I that form within the sphere? Am I the void within the form? Does not everything in life and in my own creative work as a writer emerge from formlessness into form? And is it not my function as an artist to give meaning to that to shape and define it so that the archetypal and symbolic can take on some figural meaning for the human mind? In shamanic work a portal can be seen as a doorway to a different perception offering access to fresh insights and revelations that may give you a new perspective on something that is troubling you. For me, portals and thresholds are linked and although it was unconscious of me at the time it is perhaps not actually that surprising that I named the blog that was the seed of my organisation, Gateway Women because what is a gate if not a threshold between one reality and another? And if I look back through my photos of travels to India and further east when I was younger there are so many of windows and doors in ancient ruined temples but always from the dark interior the aperture overexposed and defined by light and then whilst exploring Stanislav Groff's work on the perinatural matrices as part of my psychotherapy training the image I painted was of a light filled portal and can be interpreted as a perinatal memory of my journey from the rosy darkness of my mother's womb to the bright light of birth perhaps for me giving birth to myself over and over again as a childless woman has been my life's destiny rather than motherhood. We humans are meaning making creatures always striving to understand our own lives our own life story within a larger context whether that be the frame of our own lives and relationships or our culture's stories, myths and religions ultimately we are always exploring how we relate to the natural and more than human world and trying to make sense of our place within it. One of the things that can be frustrating as a childless woman is that there is no archetypal framework to scaffold my responses to whereas being a mother no matter how fulfilling or fraught the experiences and how worse was both including the death of her eldest son Paul age 23 it provides a ready-made set of archetypal motifs through which we and others can frame our lives. This is not the case for me because as a childless woman I exist in negative space. There is no word to describe my identity as a woman except by describing what I am not. I am childless or if chosen, child free. I am a nomo a word I coined in 2012 which is now in circulation a contraction of not mother. My sorrows and losses are invisible to others and when I do write or speak about them I'm often told by those with children that it can't be grief because you haven't really lost anything. But childlessness is a lifelong living loss and learning to live with this and to accept this loss at a soul level has been and always will be my life tasks and in articulating that loss, that absence I make it possible for others too to acknowledge it in themselves as something tangible something that they too are allowed to mourn and through that mourning be transformed. Barbara Hepworth's 1964 sculpture Single Form commissioned by the United Nations and in memory of her dear friend the late Secretary General, Dag Hammers-Cold killed like her son Paul in an aircrash speaks powerfully to me of hope after loss. The monumental scale of it and how it dwarfs Hepworth in this photo resonates with me as to what a physically and psychically overwhelming experience grief is how it overshadows everything in our lives at the time. Whilst the void represents the hope of something spiritual and ineffable that can arise from its shadow because if we love, we grieve. I am not the same person I was before I lost the dream of motherhood. I have passed through that portal in the ancient monolith and have stepped into a new field when my existence makes sense to me again. Where mainstream society still sees an absence and unfilled potential in me as a woman I see myself as being actualised in a different, less visibly tangible way. Because why should we see negative space as a powerless place? This is not the message that our archetypal, folkloric and artistic responses give it and certainly not Hepworth's. I'd like to bring my talk to a close with the words of another writer the English romantic poet John Keats who coined the phrase negative capability in a letter to his brothers in 1817 where he defined it as that place when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Barbara Hepworth's work takes me to that place and held within it the uncertainties of my childless identity feel seen and within her voids which contain universes. I feel hopeful that it includes one where to be a childless woman is to no longer be seen as some kind of freak. Thank you.