A warm welcome to Sofie Layton, who joins the Platform as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Visual & Material Lab. Her research project for this fellowship takes a collaborative practice-based approach to exploring pregnancy, infant and child loss with a focus on the inter-relations of lived experience and the artistically remediated clinical image.
Sofie is an artist, researcher and facilitator with extensive experience in visual health and public engagement. For the past decade her practice has explored the interface of art, medicine and science with different publics through a collaborative socially engaged research practice interweaving lived experience with processes of visualisation and materialisation. Her projects have been realised as commissions and exhibitions and shown nationally and internationally, including Does AI Care? (2023); The Heart of the Matter (2016-2019); and Making the Invisible Visible (2016-2018). Sofie recently completed a research-by-practice PhD at the Royal College of Art, funded by the AHRC-LAHP.
1. If your research was a film, what would the title be?
As an artist researcher my work deals with women’s health equalities, pregnancy and child loss – it’s a bit of a cheat but the title of my last installation and performance was Loss is mine and is Stored within this Body, which encapsulates the entangled nature of my work into medical imaging, loss and grief.
2. What will you be doing during your postdoctoral research?
As an artist researcher within the Visual & Material Lab I will be using my artistic practice as a way to generate new knowledge, running workshops in hospital settings and with different communities. Translating this learning through studio research making time, developing new outputs, exhibitions, installations and performances which I will also write and publish on. Additionally I would be really interested in working site-specifically, returning work to different publics in unusual contexts… I have my eye on the Cathedral as a venue.
3. What expertise and experiences will you be drawing on?
I have had a socially engaged artistic practice for over 25 years, and for the last 15 years my focus has been within the medical landscape where I have collaborated with scientists, clinicians and patients to explore different visual and narrative articulations of a range of medical conditions. I have an embedded working relationship with Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital and have also worked at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle on a large Wellcome funded project The Heart of the Matter 2014-2018 and since then I have had a commission Does AI Care? 2023 for the Science Gallery London, shown work at the Royal Academy Summer Show 2022 and have been doing my PhD at the RCA.
4. Why are you excited about working in The Platform?
It is amazing to have the opportunity to develop work that I feel very passionate about and re-situate it within the context of the Medical Humanities, to work with amazing researchers as co-creators in innovative collaborative ways.
5. What changes would you like to see as a result of your research?
As I said earlier my research deals with the question of whether we can use medical data in non-diagnostic ways and whether through the artistic remediation and translation of medical data we are able to rethink ways of working with these data to address issues that surround our medicalised bodies, with a particular focus on women’s health inequalities around miscarriage, pregnancy, stillbirth and child loss and the reality of the grief and loss that accompany these issues.
I am interested in how these topics can be opened up and represented in very different ways in order to draw attention to the problematic and messy side of women’s reproductive journeys which historically have been suppressed.
6. What interests or hobbies do you have outside your research that might surprise people?
Besides cycling, walking and visiting exhibitions and theatre, I love open water swimming and swim all year round without a wetsuit. Wherever I can I like to immerse myself in a body of outdoor water. It’s a reset, a reacquaintance with the landscape and your physical self. There is nothing more thrilling than dipping into a reservoir at 2 degrees. It has become part of my research practice and a way of thinking through difficult research problems.
We welcome Sofie to the Platform and look forward to working with her!
