Museum Edition XXL, SALLE SAUVAGE. Limited Edition of 5 Photograph

'Salle Sauvage' from award-winning fine art series Birth Undisturbed by Natalie Lennard, inMuseum Edition XXL on Premium Lustre Rag Paper at 150 x 190cm, limited to 5 +2AP. Artwork comes printed with 2cm border in addition to size stated, accompanied with a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist. Every image in Birth Undisturbed is Giclee printed with OEM 70+ year archival inks. The series is shot on world-class 100 megapixel Phase One IQ3 medium format to provide rich impeccable quality with exceptional detail on both screen and print. ____ ‘Salle Sauvage’ translates to ‘primitive room’, a term coined by renowned obstetrician Michel Odent in reference to his hospital in Pithiviers, France, with rooms designed to accommodate the primal instincts of labouring women. Here, a glass Cube set within the urban landscape of London becomes a metaphor for Odent’s primitive room and a woman’s connection with nature through homebirth. It is as though the walls of a living room have become transparent admitting our spectatorship into the private space of a birthing woman, perhaps for our enlightenment as well as vicariousness. Whilst the male partner and the midwife look on in awe, intimidation or both, they guard the space of a brazen Amazonian who stands and delivers with audacious autonomy, a race-encompassing universality. Power, pain and ecstasy intermingled in one big shout, her baby is born safely, savagely, without interruption into her own hands, which unnervingly evokes a human menagerie. Natural birth as a cabinet specimen, a primitive display that threatens to be a thing of the past? “The bearing of children ought to become as free from danger and long debility to civilised woman as it is to the savage.”— Thomas Huxley. "One cannot actively help a woman give birth. The goal is to avoid disturbing her unnecessarily." — Michel Odent.