‘Parabiosis’ - Essay by Elizabeth Fullerton, 2024

Pregnancy mutates your body in unexpected ways, producing unprecedented fluids, smells, rashes, sensations as you accommodate a second creature growing inside, feeding off your own body. Your stomach inflates beyond any satiety you’ve ever experienced, the skin stretched balloon—taut to bursting; and then, the strangeness of seeing something that is not you moving under that elastic surface, the uncontrollable clawing of limbs that are not yours.

FOREVER YOUNG?

What does it mean to be joined to another living individual? Rosie Gibbens conceived (pun intended) her project Parabiosis while pregnant and ruminating on this question. “Parabiosis”, derived from the Greek for “living beside”, refers to the connecting of two bodies so they share each other’s blood circulation. In recent years, scientists have surgically conjoined living rats to study the impact of sharing a physiological system, with early tests indicating that an older rat joined to a younger might increase its longevity and rejuvenate tissue function. Inevitably, Silicon Valley technocrats hungry for immortality have seized on this; one of them is already receiving regular blood transfusions from his son, hoping to reverse the ageing process. 

PARASITIC VAMPIRES

Given the vampiric overtones of this notion, Gibbens found herself delving into the realm of gothic horror, in which the still primitive rite of birth has become a familiar trope, a pretext for bodies to be invaded or possessed by other creatures, or gnawed away from the inside out. Exemplified by the Alien films, the horror genre reveals a deep—seated terror of mothers and their reproductive capacity, with the womb/home frequently the desecrated sanctum, as Barbara Creed notes in The Monstrous Feminine. “Horror films that depict monstrous births play on the inside/outside distinction in order to point to the inherently monstrous nature of the womb as well as the impossibility of ever completely banishing the abject from the 
 human domain” i.

DUMMIES AND BUTTPLUGS

Ideas of body horror twinned with scientific advancement permeate Parabiosis, which offers a comical and unsettling glimpse into how pregnancy and birth might look in a dystopian — if vaguely foreseeable  — future. “Imagine if people were just having babies in order to use them to become younger,” she says. Replete with clones and mirrorings — of figures, limbs, faces — Parabiosis treads a fine line between the artificial and real, absurd and sinister, childlike and sexual. Dummies double as butt plugs or nipple stoppers, ostensibly blocking seepages from orifices, yet handle—like tubes pop in and out of flesh wantonly and boundaries between internal and external blur.  

SEXLESS CYBORG

The sculpture Extracorporeal Gestation, for instance, resembles a cross between a cyborg and a sex doll. Where the stomach would be we see a jumping red skeleton puppet on a video screen like an uncanny baby scan. The doll’s legs are splayed suggestively against the wall, but with its dangling eyeballs and red tubes spewing from its mouth and eye socket, this creature is more robot than sex aid perhaps gesturing to the fact that pregnant women are often viewed as desexualised reproductive vessels that must be protected, not for themselves but as bearers of future workers in our capitalist society. This sexless sex doll/baby gestator propels us towards a futuristic parabiosis of sorts, but also to a not so distant time in which babies are no longer birthed from people’s bodies. (Hopefully nothing as bleak as the foetus fields of synthetically grown babies as seen in The Matrix.) According to Claire Horn, author of Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth, humanity is five to ten years from achieving a partial artificial womb for humans. “If, as seems more and more possible, one day the growth of embryos in a laboratory and the maintenance of infants in a neonatal ward meet in the middle,” she says, “we will achieve full ectogenesis: external gestation.” iii

BABY SHOPS

So perhaps one day there will be gleaming baby shops where people can browse the “products” and choose one to suit their needs. Or clinics where you can select from a range of attractive cyborgs to carry your baby. It was in just such a sterile, brightly lit space that Gibbens debuted Parabiosis back in May. Heavily pregnant, she activated her sculptures with a performance that nodded to artist forbears such as Rebecca Horn, with her dangerous and seductive prosthetics, and the brilliant DIY props and grotesque aesthetic of Mary Reid Kelley — yet with a corporate twist. Gibbens compares her performances where she interacts with her sculptures with “product demonstrations”, explaining, “I m interested in the idea of being a customer service type of character.”

UNRULY BIRTHING BODIES

In her performance for Parabiosis, Gibbens assumed this character dressed in a short crisp white smock and nude pointy heels, evoking a maniacal beautician or sadistic nurse. With her hair in a long brisk plait, Gibbens first lay down and began dipping a dummy into a jar of gloopy red jam and sucking on it — perhaps a reminder of the messiness and unruly behaviours of pregnant and birthing bodies, which had been otherwise banished from the space. Next she joined a fake blond plait to her own, recalling a show pony’s sleek tail, and began to trot. This is the way the ladies ride. Slow and rhythmic, getting faster. The nursery rhyme segued surreally to conjure a dominatrix with stilettos and whip. 

RIDE MY PONY

Staying with the riding metaphor, Gibbens then mounted an intriguing assemblage comprising a small green figure straddling a fragmented, kneeling larger one, with disembodied legs strapped to an old wooden ski machine, and massive grimacing mouth towering above the whole. The sculpture Multi-generational plasma swap again evokes a parabiotic sense of conjoined bodies, with the child’s legs fusing into the adult’s gigantic, outstretched arms. Here, as always in Gibbens’ work, easily missed absurd elements abound - like the lewdly pulsating massager that doubles for the adult’s boobs and the cute faces with dummies adorning its leg stumps. Donning boxing gloves, Gibbens held onto the little mannequin’s buttocks and hauled herself forward repeatedly on the ski machine, then let go and slid jerkily backwards. “It had something to do with strength and fragility, opposing states that feel very relevant to pregnancy,” she says. One might draw a parallel here with Gibbens’s 2022 project The New Me featuring three videos advertising ingeniously complicated and pointless imaginary products aimed at maximising labour efficiency by accomplishing multiple tasks at the same time. In her practice as a whole, darkly humorous references to the multimillion pound wellness industry, the pharmaco-medical profession and BDSM converge, making natural bedfellows.

MINI ME

Gibbens’s mastery of the deadpan can obscure occasional flashes of poignance. Like in her May performance when she placed a tube of lipstick in her mouth and one on her belt and used her mouth and stomach to draw twin red heartbeat lines around the wall. A third sculpture, Enlarged Exoskeletal Pearl, was partly inspired by scans showing her baby’s spine and skeleton and evokes a red puppet skeleton with knee high black boots and mottled skin. “It’s sort of like an exoskeleton, almost my skeleton, but also the skeleton of the foetus,” Gibbens notes. In her performance, the skeleton puppet was hitched up to an apparatus. When she put on a harness, it mimicked her movements, like a mini version of herself or a clone. Yet at times the skeleton went rogue and performed its own movements, begging the question, who’s in control? Is the foetus a parasite or a nurturing force?

GOOP HEAVEN

This ambiguity was again foregrounded in the final part of the performance, involving an assemblage that evoked the kind of wellness devices promoted on Gwyneth Paltrow’s website Goop. A sort of gym—machine—see—saw, it was adorned with a soft pink brain and green leg—handles. Gibbens stripped down to her underwear and bra with nipple—dummies (against leakage?), strapped on a belly covering appliquéd with a red skeleton baby, climbed onto the machine and flipped herself upside down. Defying gravity, she slowly raised her legs up onto invisible stirrups as the baby skeleton took the ascendant position.

Gibbens’s sculptures and performance around Parabiosis deftly bring out the unpredictable, absurd and wondrous elements that are part and parcel of pregnancy and birth — an act that reportedly happens at least 260 times a minute around the world. Maggie Nelson feels like an important touchstone as she ponders on birth in The Argonauts, “How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolise or enact the ultimate conformity?” Right-wingers everywhere are striving to reduce the rights of pregnant people and turn childbirth into a state-run orthodoxy. Ever since Life magazine splashed a photograph of a foetus on its cover in 1965, modern society has increasingly claimed a stake in the unborn baby, whose rights are becoming paramount. Through her practice grounded in the absurd, Gibbens subtly asserts resistance to this capitalist conformity. Her celebration of the pregnant body in all its ghoulish, nonsensical, messy, gooey weirdness is, by extension, a celebration of waywardness and insubordination. We need more of it.

i Creed, Barbara, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London, Routledge: 1993, New York, Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge: 2024) p.57

ii All quotes by the artist are from our conversation on Sept 10, 2024.

ii Horn, Claire, Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth (London, Wellcome Collection: 2023) p.11 iv Nelson, Maggie, The Argonauts (Minneapolis, Minnesota, Graywolf Press: 2015, London, Melville House: 2016) p.16