Let's Take a Deep Breath

No seriously, take a deep breath with me. I think we need it. Maybe your toddler decided this was the week he was going to drop his nap. The hour and a half plus during the day you use to get things done, like write this newsletter or create work for your group exhibition that opens in two weeks. Maybe you realised that your overly ambitious plan for creating work for said exhibition really was overly ambitious, particularly with an hour and a half less working time, and now you’re having those paralysing, where-do-I-start-what-do-I-cut thoughts, and handling it by doing nothing. Maybe your brain just informed you that the guy that played Han Solo in that quite-rubbish Solo film was the same guy from Beautiful Creatures, a film you watched randomly while breastfeeding at three in the morning while the toddler was much smaller, and that he’s the same guy who was more recently in that Ironheart programme but why has this just come to you now? Are you going insane? Is it important, somehow, that you now know this, when you didn’t whilst watching any of these pockets of television? How will it help you with any of the former conundrums?

Take a deep breath. Your diaphragm is moving, squeezing your lungs or allowing them to expand, and draw air in, or expel air out. Your lungs are full of branching tubes (called the trachea at their largest, getting smaller to become bronchi and yet smaller still to become bronchioles before they end in microscopic alveoli, which handle the exchange of gases in your bloodstream), kinda like a bag of wormholes. These bags live in their own bag, which in turn is made of two bags, so that your lungs can slide around in their double bag and expand and contract with basically no friction because, imagine. That would be bad.

Your lungs might develop while you are an embryo, but you’re floating around in fluid so they don’t start to work until you’re born and hit air. No wonder newborns are so snuffly and sound like they’re having a terrible time breathing - they’ve literally never done it before. And you can’t talk them round to taking deep breaths and getting the hang of it because they’ve never done anything before, so they don’t understand.

Another deep breath: your left lung has a chunk out of it because your heart sits there. Your lungs wrap around your heart, because the two organs need to work closely together to make sure the blood gets into the lungs so they can exchange the gases and the lungs need to send the blood back to the heart so the heart can make sure it gets to the rest of your body. It’s a lovely relationship, all teamwork and hugs.

And one more with me: pregnancy restricts your lung capacity, because you grow a bloody huge extra organ that holds a massive baby (ok, maybe my adjectives there are coloured by my current predicament) and reduces the space for oxygen exchange. Pregnant right now, or ever been pregnant, and noticed you felt short of breath even before the baby got massive? Yeah. Progesterone is in high levels during pregnancy - it’s all very important for growing a baby - and those high levels make you breathe faster. Because you’re just a vessel now, you don’t need time to get work done or space to think or air to breathe. You are growing another person, which means you have grown the magical powers that enable you to do everything you did before, with considerably less time and brain power and lung capacity. This is a wonderful adventure.

Let’s take a deep breath.

Everything is going to be brilliant.

Parallels III opens on the 26th September in Coburg House; I will be the enormous pregnant lady who somehow managed to pull work together and put it on the wall, alongside three significantly more put together artists whose carefully considered pieces will be on display alongside mine. See you there? We can do big breaths together with our spongy heart-huggers.