pregnancy comic iv

somewhat predictably (for me), not a comic

This is part of an ongoing series which I am trying to publish every two weeks during pregnancy, probaby less frequently as baby is born (everything subject to change). If you are reading this for the first time, you can find the other entries below.

Part I is available here.

Part II is available here.

Part III is here.

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Week 33 + 34

I have been too pregnant to go the Motherhood exhibition.

That’s what I keep telling myself.

I’m simply too tired, too much pelvic girdle pain. Blah-di-blah-blah blah. I’m sick of myself, sick of complaining. Yada yada who cares.

Last week, I life modelled for the first and last time before the baby comes at a local group in Ballarat. I have life-modelled before, there and other places, but not while carrying the weight (philosophical, otherwise) of another human.

I did it because it is a rare thing to be able to draw this liminal state. People are not pregnant for very long. People are heavily pregnant for an even shorter period. It felt generous, but was of course self-serving: I wanted to document my pregnancy.

This is something I’ve been drawn to do more and more. Why? The real, immutable reason eludes me. Maybe it is to try to feel some control over this constantly shifting, blooming, seething, mutating state. To have something to hold onto. To bite down on it, like a dog on a bone. There is a photobooth at the university where I am writing my PhD. Every time I go in I try to take a self-portrait.

Photobooth photo, Week 5.

In the above photo I am five weeks pregnant, which is really three weeks pregnant, if you actually count it from when the embryo entered my uterus. My body is puffy from hormone injections, emotional eating, rushes of cortisol, maybe. I felt disappointed when it was spat out the machine’s printer. Afraid I wouldn’t see the marked difference between where I was then and where I am now.

I have always been curious about how I appear to other people. I walk down the street and can’t help but stare into a mirror. It’s not vanity, or not just vanity. I often feel like a parrot, attracted perilously to my own image on shiny surfaces. What is it like to exist outside this body? If I was a stranger, and was to encounter myself, would I think, that chick looks like a real bitch? And so on, etc.

That old Bergerism:

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

In 2026, is that still true? I don’t think we have ever felt so surveilled, and observed, so conscious of our own images.

Self portrait, 2025.

I keep coming back to this quote from feminist bioethics scholar Margrit Shildrick.

Nowhere perhaps is female excess more evident and more provocative of male anxiety than in reproduction. The capacity to be simultaneously both self and other in pregnancy, which is the potential of every woman, is the paradigm case of breached boundaries.

When I am photographing myself, it’s not just me in the picture anymore. Whether or not another might be able to tell that I am pregnant, I am doubled. When I model, I am also modelling for two. I told one of the artists this, at the creaky old historical society building where they hold the life modelling sessions. “Baby’s first paycheck,” I said when the organiser handed me the fee.

I went and bought a quesadilla afterwards. Our work feeding baby. Feeding me.

A life-modelling portrait of me by Kaz Edwards, 2026.

I was disappointed I didn’t look pregnant enough in some of the images. I felt like it just looked like a big belly in some of them. Being someone whose weight has vacillated a lot over her lifetime, I can never quite understand where my body fits. In pregnancy, I am often bumping my bump into doorways. I am always over or underestimating my dimensions.

Life drawing by Tim Denton, 2026.

Is there an essential essence of a self that might be captured in an image of a person? If so, is it more likely to be apprehended by another person, or themselves? Does this essence stay around once the person has gone, in images and other talismans, or is the blackboard wiped clean with their departure?

Another self portrait where I attempted to capture but missed my belly, 2026.

Week 25. Self portrait, 2026.

Week 34, self-portrait, 2026.

One of the most famous images that evokes pregnancy is the Venus of Willendorf. A bunch of these stone-age beauties survive, their bodies big and round, breasts and bellies huge and impressive. There are all kinds of theories about them: that they were fertility idols, or depictions of goddesses.

My pet theory, the one I am most attracted to, is that they were self-portraits, created by women who couldn’t see their reflections, looking down at their big, beautiful bodies, bursting with rich, juicy life.

The Venus of Willendorf c.28,000–25,0000 BC, by unknown artist.

Life modelling portrait by Sylvia Hollis.

The quintessential pregnant person in Western art was surely The Virgin Mary. But for a long time, it was rare to portray the Virgin Mary with her belly (perhaps due to the previously mentioned anxieties the pregnant body provokes). A microtrend of these styles of portraits proliferated in Tuscany in the Middle Ages, but was not often repeated.

Madonna del Porta, Piero della Francesca after 1457

In the 16th century, secular depictions of pregnant women became popular, as symbols of dynastic success, and as a sign of virility.

Marcus Gheeraerts II, Portrait of a Woman in Red, 1620

However, they continued to carry a certain taboo for many years: both, because they represented the sexual activity of the subject and also because of the prevalence of death in childbirth. In the below portrait, Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales appears in a maternity dress. She would die less than a year later, after a stillbirth.

Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales, George Dawe, 1817.

In the 20th century, as mores changed and maternal death reduced, portraiture of pregnancy became more liberal. Here are a couple of my favourite examples. I don’t know what to say about them, other than that they are beautiful and I love them.

Pregnant Maria by Alice Neel, 1964.

Pregnant Nude by Lucian Freud, 2002.

There are many more paintings and depictions of pregnancy these days. I’m sure many of them are at the NGV Motherhood exhibition, and elsewhere. I’m sure many of these are self-portraits.

I recently watched Six Feet Under for the first time. In the finale (small spoiler, sorry) the artist, Claire, is taking a picture of her family, before she is moving across the country to New York to start her new life. As she looks through the viewfinder, her brother tells her:

By having a child, maybe more than ever, I am being pressed up against my own impermanence. I am making something, someone who will, hope against hope, outstretch me, exceed my boundaries. Flourish and outlive me.

Perhaps I want to hold onto this feeling, of me together with them, same place, same time, as long and hard as I can.