About the Project

Creative Push is a multimedia visual art and oral history project that focuses on the most formative of human experiences: birth. Personal, intimate storytelling is the central method by which birth stories are usually communicated, and though those stories rarely take concrete form, they are often very visual. Creative Push establishes a forum through which birth narratives can be shared more widely, and it works to develop such stories’ nascent visuality, collecting audio recordings in which women describe their experiences of labor and delivery, and making them available to visual artists. Presented alongside the artworks they inspire, the audio recordings spur much-needed conversations around pregnancy and birth and create meaningful dialogues between storytelling and visual art.

The experience of having a baby reflects the depth of what it means to be human: birth stories are full of conflict, politics, complexity, passion, drama, heartbreak, and horror. The shared experiences between mothers that are communicated in these stories transcend societal niceties; they are emotionally honest expressions of raw corporeality. Through the retelling and interpreting of our birth stories we find meaning in our experiences. Diverse communities are brought together through these stories, though the particularities of pregnancy and birth are strongly impacted by society, a powerful core of shared experience remains, and it can shorten distances and cut through differences.

Creative Push collects, transforms, displays, and circulates birth stories and artworks, creating meaning and connectivity through art and sharing. The project is made possible by funding provided by the Arizona State University Institute of Humanities Research, the Herberger Institute of Design and Art joint seed grant, the Arizona State University School of Art faculty research funds and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Creative Push is a research collection and research project, recordings are available for research purposes only. Creative Push audio recordings are archived at the Kinsey Institute in Indiana and in the Arizona State University Digital Library, where the full-unedited interviews are available for download.

Creative Push by Forrest Solis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License