Mila Oshin (UK, Exeter)
Passage (2016)
Poetry collection, music album, short film
“I am moved by the sustained anguish yet calm contained in these poems.”
Dr Andrea Liss, author ‘Feminist Art and the Maternal’, USA
“I love the poems so much. Thank you for your courage in writing about motherhood with such passion and clarity.”
H Pen, Doula, UK
“Brave, brilliant and important work. I’ll never forget your performance.”
E Finucane, Artist, Ireland
Listen to the Passage album for free here:
ARTIST STATEMENT:
“The birth of our first child ended in a forceps delivery which left me with permanent physical trauma. Against the odds, the birth of our second child almost two and a half years later happened at home, without a midwife. Yet, no matter how empowering and life-affirming this experience was, rather than having a healing effect, it only seemed to magnify the horror of our first birth and its lingering repercussions.
When I eventually started working again, there was little else I could think of or write about. The poems in Passage are the result. Raw, intimate and at times brutally honest, the works expose my most inner journey as I came to terms with my first birth and its consequences, my experience of new parenthood and our second birth.
The musical renditions of ten of the poems, enclosed on a CD album, were written and performed together with my husband and long-term creative partner Kris Jager with whom I have worked under the name of artist duo Drunk With Joy for ten years.”
Artist duo Mila Oshin and Kris Jager (a.k.a. Drunk With Joy) are founders and joint artistic directors/curators of Joy Experiment, a collaborative cross-artform production and presentation platform for socio-critical visual, performing, literary, digital and film art, which initiated Project AfterBirth in 2014.