Tokophobia – Sykes

Artist

TOKOPHOBIA

I stared into the shallow sockets of the malformed infant skull. Fingerprints in plasticine, pressure applied ever so lightly. It was lit like a valuable artefact from some ancient civilisation. Some people find all this so fascinating, as evidenced by those milling around the edge of my field of vision. My focus was so intense they seemed like chattering ghosts; the rest of the world was utterly insignificant.

“This was from a jellyfish, it was… a dark day,” he muttered uncomfortably over my shoulder. I placed my hand on my belly and squeezed. I hoped it was listening. “We never really figured out whether it was a stillbirth or not… very difficult to tell if a hydrozoa is alive, you know; generally anything non-mammalian doesn’t have a chance,” he continued, “By human standards it was most certainly dead, but maybe there was something there… they want us to save everything…”

“I think mine might be from a squid, so…”

-excerpt from my short story The Museum of Cautionary Tales

Tokophobia is the intense fear of pregnancy and childbirth. ‘The Dream’ to me evokes a very specific nightmare I had years ago clearly derived from this anxiety.

The background of this piece is intended to evoke the tiles of the two environments I remember most clearly from this dream; black with white grout in the museum and white with black grout in the hospital I ended up in at the end.

The red lines are based on the brainwaves observed when someone enters REM sleep. I have continued the protein theme of my other work with an abstract depiction of an acetylcholine receptor, associated with the process of dreaming. By happy accident the structure of this protein is somewhat reminiscent of a pair of squid (to me at least!).