Now to begin with my project Womb Room.

For a few years, I’ve been exploring a project called Womb Room. The idea is to ask a central question:

If your womb were a place you could visit, what would it look like?

I want people living with chronic conditions of the uterus and ovaries to creatively explore what their wombs would look like if they were real spaces we could visit as human beings. It’s been difficult because I struggle to know where to begin. How will I bring this project to life? I go between wanting the project to be VR and a physical installation that people can go to. Maybe it can be both?

The most intimidating thing for me is knowing whether I have the skills to do this. This is why it’s been really exciting to join this residency. After experimenting with AI in the previous posts, I decided to have my first go at seeing what it would produce in relation to the central question I plan to ask people who will participate in the project.

A few years ago, I asked a couple of people the question I mentioned above. I decided to use one of the responses I got and turn it into a prompt for Midjourney.

This was the original response. For reference, this person has endometriosis and is a yoga instructor and herbalist.

“I honestly think that my uterus and my ovaries and all of my little reproductive organs I feel like it’s a beautiful garden. I think it’s a gorgeous gorgeous garden. It’s lush, it’s fertile. It’s it’s just spectacular to behold. However, if I am not doing the right kind of gardening you know, like when I’m not doing the, the best in terms of staying on top of like diet and exercise and the things that I know help me to manage the inflammation…maybe my garden is becoming a little bit over on with thorns, or maybe there’s a few too many difficult weeds that need pruning.

I think when my endometriosis is flaring, and it’s not at its greatest, I like to imagine that maybe it’s just that I need to tend to the garden in a more sensitive way. Do a little pruning, maybe throw a little fertiliser on there. Maybe cut out some of the thorny rose bushes, you know. But I never like to imagine it as anything less than beautiful and fertile and just lush and gorgeous. Because I think, you know, despite what it may be doing that doesn’t feel ideal, it’s still this magical thing of complete, utter mastery that I just, I can’t help but like, be in awe of it and its beauty.”

I really love this response because it challenged my expectations. I assumed most of the people who would respond to the question I posed would give really intense and negative imagery, but this person described their womb as something beautiful regardless of how much pain it causes them.

I wanted this to be my first attempt and bringing my project to life.

Here is the prompt I created from the response above:

“a photorealistic image of a room which looks like a lush garden inside which is representative of the uterus of someone with endometriosis“a photorealistic image of a room which looks like a lush garden inside which is representative of the uterus of someone with endometriosis.”

It doesn’t quite encapsulate everything that was mentioned in the response above, however, it’s a good place to start. In my next post, I’ll share the imagery generated from the prompt and what I plan to do to bring my ideas to life for this project.