An introduction to Blood Baby, from lead artist Meg Foley

In 2019, I began using fabric, foam, and carpet to extend embodied space through interactive objects and installations, affording somatic life to objects and “feeling back” on and through my body. This has developed into and informed my current project, Blood Baby. It explores my experience of queer motherhood in a trans family and the intersecting bodily experiences of queer parenting, pregnancy, gender, sexuality, and fellowship. And also, rocks. Lots of rocks, and body heat, and spirituality, and thinking about how we build—or gestate—ourselves on the daily.

I consider Blood Baby a universe. A collection of performance and body-based explorations around and within the idea of queer and trans parenting, with these experiences distinctly embodied by the parent or caregiver in question—and that experience is situated in a larger timeline of creation, specifically the earth’s creation and geological progress.

In the universe analogy, each iteration is a constellation full of its own moving parts, formal elements, and aesthetic logic, yet they are all connected by their approach to the central question exploring how we shape our queer and trans families and self in tandem. And they share conceptual and physical materials, atmospheres, vibes…. I imagine them as distinct facets on the complicated prism of bodily experience (gender, gestation, sexuality, and parenting), that are pulled apart into relief so that each can be explored in depth.

There is no singular access point to these questions or to this experience. It’s all Blood Baby.