For the past two years, much of my research has depended upon my collaboration with Elizabeth Horn-Walker, an art activist who founded the ART of Infertility. This art, oral history and portraiture project works to create embodied representations of infertility through art, poetry and storytelling. As a collaborative partnership, Elizabeth and I travel the country facilitating arts-based workshops and curating community-based art exhibits depicting diverse perspectives of infertility. At these workshops, we invite our participants to bring objects representative of their experiences with infertility. These instructions have resulted in a range of materials brought to workshops, including: ultrasound photos, syringes,…
Author: Maria Novotny
Maria Novotny
Maria Novotny is a PhD Candidate in Rhetoric & Writing at Michigan State University. Her dissertation explores rhetorics of infertility through a community-based art organization, the ART of Infertility. Her research explores how art, as an extended form of multimodal composition, functions as an embodied translation to the experiences of medicine.