Steam In My Mouth
Exhibited at TCB Gallery, 2023
Catalogue essay by Roslyn Orlando

Steam In My Mouth by Camille Laddawan explores the unspeakable realm of attempting to communicate with a person-becoming. How does one sense the unborn? How is a relationship formed? How do parents-becoming glimpse the ungraspable, future-bound state of an unknown other? How does the imagination – layered with the mire of life – manifest as this person-becoming unfolds and interrupts from within?

The word person has its roots in the Latin persona, which means ‘a mask used by an actor’, or ‘a character in a play’. This early definition alludes to the social nature of personhood, that a person can be anyone, but materialises as a specific individual through the social apparatus of language.

The concept of the individual is not just semantic, but part of an ideology that can be traced to the early modern period. At this time, biological science was organised around the belief that organisms exist as separate, particulate entities. That is, modern Western science split organisms into discrete categories, delineating living beings as individual units. We inherit and live through a historical canon that ignores and obscures the wildly diverse ways in which organisms replicate and reproduce, in order to sanctify the primacy of the autonomous individual. In this vein, biological sciences have tended to overstate the importance of vertically aligned sexual reproduction between two human bodies of opposing sexes, when forming that of a third. However, it is in the early stages of a person in formation – a pre-language space – where notions of individuality and the delimited body of the person-becoming, may be most readily contested.

Recent scientific discoveries indicate that symbiosis and cellular communication between the pregnant person and the foetus are far more complex than previously understood. It is commonly known that the pregnant parent provides the material conditions and sustenance to the foetus, first through hormones produced by the ovaries, and then through the placenta. More recently, it has been discovered that foetal cells also move the other way through the placenta and into the parent’s bloodstream, affecting the body in positive, negative and neutral ways. The presence of foetal cells in maternal tissue, which remain in the body for the rest of the parent’s life, is known as ‘foetal microchimerism’.

In ancient Greek mythology, chimeras are composite creatures assembled from different animal parts. The classic example from Homer’s Iliad is the fire-breathing beast with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail. Recent research shows that even in the womb, a foetus is not a sterile, individual unit, but grows in tandem with its own unique symbiotic community of bacteria; the unborn is an entity made with and assembled of a whole host of ‘other’ entities.

Central to this body of work are two beadings made from glass seed beads. Vertical lines represent the heart rates of parent and foetus: the engines that transmit cells between bodies. Encoded within these heartbeat lines are cravings signalled to Camille in early pregnancy, namely, an intense desire to consume “anything hot, scorching, boiling”. Rendered in her signature Tone Code, these phrases are translated from bodily feeling into the social realm of language, and then made unintelligible again through the form of code.

A secondary definition of chimera is equally apt in the context of attempting to perceive a being not-yet-known: ‘an illusion or fabrication of the mind’. Up until the advent of modern medicine, the pregnant parent had an authorial role in developing a mind’s eye image of the foetus. The idea of what was to come, was produced via cravings, dreams, fatigues and superstitions. Camille craves, “Steam in my mouth, that’s all I want”. Days pass as intervals of exhaustion and rest. Through a breeze, I feel the distinct awareness of a new presence in our midst. These messages occur, unbeholden to any kind of literal articulation. However, they are also punctured by the visual presence of the foetus.

According to German theorist Barbara Duden, the ‘human foetus’ did not used to be part of common English parlance; it was solely a technical term. In ordinary language, one spoke instead about the ‘unborn’. Until recently, the epistemic status of the unborn was not that of an object to be seen or acted upon. “The unborn throughout history was the non-dum par excellence, the ‘not-yet’ in its strongest sense”.

With the advent of medical imaging such as ultrasounds, the once mirky realm of the “not yet” has become a site of inspection, a visualised, medicalised and socialised presence. Much has been written about the medicalisation, and over-medicalisation of pregnancy in the past one hundred years, as the parent’s position and bodily autonomy has been given over to what Foucault terms the medical gaze.

However, sitting in the ultrasound theatre, (a theatre where we become an audience in witness of a persona), we encounter a kind of cyborgian interaction with the human-becoming. As electric pulses are transmitted through crystal to generate sound frequencies beyond the range of human hearing, and as those sound waves bounce off tissues, organs and bones, and as those echoes are received by the crystal and transfigured into the image of the foetus, suddenly, the unknown unborn materialises into something seen. The magical affect of ultrasonic image construction may be the product of a pathologically driven risk-averse global industry, but it undeniably takes its place in the twenty first century parents’ catalogue of bringing the child into being. And this sighting can be something of a revelation.

Four etchings are included in the exhibition: a series of abstract lines imprinted from the metallic surface of the copper plate onto paper. This transferral of data from one medium to another is a kind of echo, akin to the pulses of an ultrasound bouncing off surfaces to create an impression. As Barthes notes, painting and writing start with the same gesture. A child might write a chimney or draw their name. As a linguistic code has not yet formed, mark-making is purely gestural. Camille has employed the technique of ‘asemic writing’ to invoke the open semantic form of pre-language communication. One etching, titled 18 Months replicates one of her own scribblings as a child; and in another titled 399 Months, she discards symbolic language to return to an embodied state.

The space of harbouring an unborn operates at various registers of feeling and articulation. We occupy the theatre of our lives, in which we engage with language as an apparatus for translating private and wordless experiences into the social sphere. The pregnant parent occupies the familiar space of their individual personhood, and feels it unravel, as cells are transferred back and forth between bodies. We find ourselves in a space interjected by the magic and supremacy of medical technology as a way to extend the senses of the human body to reveal the imagined and invisible as something to be ‘true’. And finally, we, Camille particularly, are constantly tuning into a nonverbal realm of bodily messages that arrive in the forms of cravings, dreams, moods, fatigues, superstitions and wild hope for this creature-becoming. In all of these states of message-making and receiving, there is a tousle between illusion and science, parental instinct and routine medical checks, symbiosis and separation.

1 Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp and Albert I. Tauber. “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 87.4 (2012).

2 David Griffiths. “Queer Theory for Lichens.” UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies No. 19 (2015).

3 Amy M. Boddy, Angelo Fortunato, Melissa Wilson Sayres and Athena Aktipis. “Fetal microchimerism and maternal health: A review and evolutionary analysis of cooperation and conflict beyond the womb.” BioEssays (2015).

4 Barbara Duden. “The Fetus as an Object of Our Time”. Anthropology and Aesthetics No. 25 (Spring, 1994).

5 Mahmut Mutman and Ersan Ocak. “Fetal culture: Ultrasound imaging and the formation of the human” Radical Philosophy No. 147 (2008).

6 Peter Schwenger. Asemic: The Art of Writing. University of Minnesota Press (2019).