About “Celebration Bust” by Laura Taylor Watton

“Celebration Bust” was created to be launched during Breastfeeding Awareness Week 2011.  It is hoped that The Bust will help to raise awareness of the work that goes on helping to support mum and baby partnerships in their breastfeeding relationships.  The “Celebration Bust” is designed to make people look, to be a celebration of the ability of a woman’s body to nurture her child, a celebration of the breastfeeding relationships depicted upon it and in the long term to confront some of the cultural assumptions we have about the female anatomy!   What is important, to me at least, that this “bust” is a celebration but not particularly a tool for promotion…

Every time I go to buy fuel for my car of to the corner shop for a loaf of bread I and my children are continually confronted with sexual imagery almost entirely of the female form.  These images are everywhere; adverts, soaps, films and music videos – none of it censored or placed after the 9pm watershed but right there in our faces 24/7. Is it really any wonder that women and girls have hang ups especially when it comes to feeding babies.

My own personal aim is; for the women that I support to be able to breastfeed for as long as they want to breastfeed for. For this, one of the things they need  is support and understanding from the culture in which they live; and part of that is challenging the beliefs that are held about breasts. Recently perpetuated very eloquently put by Jeremy Clarkson and general media coverage.   I don’t doubt that “Celebration Bust” will stir some emotions in people.  A mixture of anger and humour maybe? Maybe bashfulness and shame? But ultimately I hope that it will entice people to take a closer look and see all the faces of smiling children and the bodies that sustain them and think yes, that is what I would like for my family, there IS support to help me achieve it. Idealistic, perhaps? Or maybe just showing a culture, that seems to have forgotten, that our “funbags” have another very important function.

There is so much misinformation flying around surrounding breastfeeding and part of the project is to draw attention to that.  The “Celebration Bust” will be visiting public places across South Shropshire. As well as raising awareness of the Boobiful Babies group it is hoped that on its journey it can help to “BUST!” some of the myths that surround breastfeeding.

At the moment it is sat in Ludlow Library in South Shropshire.  Next stop is the window of a Cancer Research shop, a local school has asked to host it and we are getting a great amount of interest from other public buildings.

So, Here they are, a pair of breasts. Yes they may play a part in creating babies but they also come in very handy when feeding them too.

As for how many of my objectives the bust will meet..? I don`t know. But it’s certainly met the first – people are defiantly taking a look!

Laura

– Part of the Boobiful Babies Team in Ludlow, Shropshire.