Remembering Baby Exhibition

An exhibition exploring professional and parental encounters with death at the very beginning of life. See, hear and sense how care is enacted through contemporary mortuary work and memorialisation practices.

Remembering Baby: Life, Loss and Post-mortem is a free, public exhibition inspired by the End of or Start of Life? research project - a study that explores professional and parental encounters with death at the very start of life.

The exhibition seeks to make these experiences more visible and features a collection of work that challenges taboos surrounding early life-loss – especially in relation to post-mortem. These exhibits include visual images, physical objects and sound installations, each sensitively exploring what happens when a baby dies – from both parental and professional perspectives.

At the heart of the exhibition is an acknowledgement that the death of a baby involves a simultaneous emergence and loss of personhood, which signifies both the beginning and end of life. This narrative runs throughout the exhibition and visitors are invited to identify this in the exhibits and to reflect on these themes.

Dr Kate Reed (Project Lead), Dr Julie Ellis (Research Associate) and Dr Elspeth Whitby (Project Co-Investigator) from The University of Sheffield have worked with British Institute of Radiology artist in residence, Hugh Turvey HonFRPS to put together the exhibition. They have teamed up with sound artist Justin Wiggan to develop his Life Echo work as part of the exhibition.