From Birth Undisturbed, fictional narrative photo series. Salle Sauvage translates to ‘primitive room’, a term coined by French obstetrician Michel Odent in reference to the rooms he designed at his hospital in Pithiviers to accommodate a woman's primal labouring instincts. In this scene, a glass Cube set within the urban London landscape becomes a metaphor for Odent’s concept and a woman’s connection with nature through homebirth. It is as if the walls of a living room have become transparent, admitting our spectatorship into the private space of a birthing woman, bearing a deeper recent significance with childbirth now being freed from censorship on social media in 2018.

“Buscar la forma” say the women of the Yucatan, meaning to find your style, in contrast to the Western medical model’s insistence of prescribing one generally correct position for birth. Whilst the male partner and the midwife look on in awe, intimidation or both, they guard the space of a Amazonian character who stands and delivers with audacious autonomy and a race-encompassing universality. Power, pain and ecstasy intermingled in one big shout, her baby is born savagely, without interruption into her own hands. In the words of Ina May Gaskin, she “lets her monkey do it”; an animal behind a screen that poignantly, could also unnervingly evoke a human menagerie: natural birth as a cabinet specimen, a primitive display that threatens to be a thing of the past?