Visual materialisation of loss: artistic engagements with medical data and imagery as an exploration of pregnancy and child loss

Medically derived data and imagery (eg, ultrasound, CT, MRI) has the potential to open up the meaning of pregnancy and child loss beyond the diagnostic. This paper examines how such data and imagery can be subject to artistic translation and remediation as a way of exploring the complexities of grief and loss. Drawing on work within the medical humanities, the social sciences and the arts, the paper reports on how an artistic engagement with medical data and imagery can carefully and ethically be employed to explore issues of grief and loss. This is further located within an ‘ethics of care’ which, following Puig de la Bellacasa, treats care (of medical data, participants and audiences) as a methodological problem. I discuss three particular artworks— Gestationality (2022), Subcutaneous (2023) and The Topography Table (2023)—that were constituent parts of the performative installation Loss is Mine and is Stored within this Body (2025). In the process, I show how such concepts as haptic visuality and scale were central to the specific artistic practices and the artworks themselves, serving to open up the experience of grief and loss in the final performative installation. I conclude by suggesting that a visual and multisensory artistic practice, partly considered through a critical medical humanities’ framing, can have a significant role in highlighting issues that surround pregnancy and child loss.