The Feeding Chair, born out of collaborative arts-based project Feed, invites people to sit and feed their babies and children in welcoming public places. Its very presence in museums, galleries and community spaces is unapologetic, rebellious, yet beautiful. The Chair declares a welcome and a nurturing space for mothers, caregivers and babies, nestling between its soft yet prominent headrests and arms, and at the same time provoking conversation about who society expects to see using it. As part of a UK tour, the Chair is currently hosted by Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre, where a temporary feeding and family area has popped up in their expansive café bar, including the Feeding Futures Floor Flag by design researcher Sally Sutherland.
It seems fitting that the Chair comes to Cardiff, a rich melting pot of language, culture and heritage, whose port became home to a pioneering multicultural community of over fifty nationalities, one hundred years ago. Cardiff is proud to have remained a (mostly) welcoming City of Sanctuary. Chapter is situated in Cardiff’s vibrant, multicultural and diverse community in Canton, and the Chair sits within its café seating area, inviting and unobtrusive. Chapter curator, Simrath Panaser, tells me they want to create a safe space for all of Cardiff’s residents. They hope that hosting the Chair will be a catalyst for opening their venue further, experimenting with how they use their café bar and inviting visitors’ ideas for how to make their venue even more welcoming for families.
Chapter, a finalist of the prestigious Art fund Museum of the Year Award in 2025, is also partnering with an inspirational local charity, as part of Feed, called The Birth Partner Project, which provides volunteer birth partners to support women seeking sanctuary who would otherwise face birth alone. The collaboration welcomes mamas (as they call one another) with their babies, to safely explore the wider venue and Chair itself. It is hoped that this space will enable their voices to be heard, as they relate their experiences of navigating their new country as a new mother, and what can be done in our public spaces to ensure they are fully welcomed.
Wales is known for many things, but our rebellious spirit is perhaps the most intriguing association, from resisting medieval English tyranny that banned speaking Welsh (although I’m sure Welsh mams continued to whisper words in their mother tongue in the dark to their babies!), to graffitiing over road signs with Welsh place names in the 1960s and 70s. In some ways, the drive to normalise breastfeeding in public spaces and other raw parts of motherhood needs to be rebellious in nature too, taking a stance of: “I am here, see me, I will not be moved”.
It is even more fitting then that the Chair will witness both the ‘Refugee Week’ celebrations and ‘World Breastfeeding Week’ during its visit to the Welsh capital. We have a unique word for a safe space in our Welsh language, a cross between a hug or cuddle and a cubby hole: ‘cwtch’. Sitting on the Chair, I imagine giving my own child a cwtch and ponder just how privileged I am to be able to feed him in public, usually without fear of being told to leave or feeling the burn of disproving eyes. I know this is not the case for every feeding parent.
We’re a complex society. We love the glow of pregnant bumps and new baby gurgles. Some public feeding is met with admiration (if the babies are little, quiet, ‘normal’, and contained). But the moment society thinks that this baby is getting too old to feed (despite the WHO recommending breastfeeding ‘to two years and beyond’), or if you need to express milk first with a noisy breast pump or even tube feed, something shifts. The less visible parts of our postpartum life crash into the very visible world of public, community space. Leanne Pearce’s gentle and heart-aching series, Breastfeeding the Brave, for example, depicts the unseen world of pediatric care, and babies’ feeding journeys that involve tubes and wires. Indeed, one can almost hear the beeping of hospital monitors through the canvas. The portraits make visible the hidden, and widen our thinking.
Then there are those whom some parts of society would rather not see in our public spaces at all, those seeking sanctuary from other worlds; fleeing war, persecution, family violence, yet with hope, through immeasurable strength and resilience. Sadly there are certain areas they may simply not go to feed their babies for fear of not being welcome. The Chair subtly challenges passers-by to ask themselves what kinds of behaviour and what sort of people would be acceptable in this space.
I was struck by the Feeding Chair’s angular presence. Jarring corners, edges, firm and strong, yet welcoming, somehow soft. The very fact that the Chair even needs to come with its rebellious edge is difficult to swallow. Why should feeding our babies even still be contentious? Like the Chair, there is a stubbornness that often bubbles up when transitioning to motherhood or ‘matrescence’, a term first used by Dana Raphael in 1975, the invisible yet visceral transition of mind, body and spirit, forever altered.
I battled to establish breastfeeding with my own son who was born with a severe tongue-tie. The same child who, over the next two and half years would nurse on trains, planes and in bus stops, on the beach, in fancy restaurants, a library, and in church services. It was a combination of his determination to feed on-demand, and my new-found confidence to simply give him what he needed – a very normal and natural act – in the face of the watchful eyes of the public. Sitting on the Chair, I recalled a moment of defiance when I once staged a photo at a petting zoo whose Health & Safety leaflet prohibited breastfeeding on site, one hand supporting my happy-to-comply baby and the rage-inducing leaflet in the other, plonked on the grass between the chicken coop and the goat pen. No one seemed to notice my rebellion, but it left me triumphant, and questioning how others feel in public.
One of the ways I explored my own matrescence was through viewing art, discovering my new identity through other’s perspectives, just as the art of the Chair has done during its tour. Hans Larwin’s depiction of an exhausted mother tandem feeding, utter sleep deprivation, eyes closed with babies still attached at the breast, gave me comfort. I felt less alone in the all-night, ‘open-bar’ feeding sessions. Through similar artworks, I began to realise the shift I had gone through was an ancient one. I searched the faces of mothers in the art world to find myself, to know I was part of a ‘them’. Conversely, I was surprised by the discomfort I felt viewing other representations: a mother nursing her baby surrounded by iron-red hues of blood and meat in Esther Sarto’s Butchershop Bliss. Perhaps I had adopted society’s judgement, or simply had not considered how infant-feeding transcends civic considerations. Similarly, Natalie Lennard’s spectacular yet subversive Birth Undisturbed project portrayed a unique image of the Virgin Mary birthing Jesus with the realism of maternal blood, a desperate scream and physical feminine power, which most artists of the nativity avoid. Perhaps I too have become conditioned by societal thinking.
As I circled the Chair, I took in the alluring artwork by Jade de Montserrat. I noticed the front panels underneath the armrest which revealed the phrase ‘Love cries’ on either side. While pondering the phrase’s meaning, I remembered how my Bulgarian Grandmother taught me never to cry in public. Instead, you go to your room and shut your door to cry silently, especially as the woman in the home. Much of my understanding around matrescence became about how much we allow ourselves to feel, to physically express the transition to motherhood, and how much our society expects that act of feeling to happen away from watching eyes.
Here in Wales, we feel together, but we are still tentatively learning to do this with mothers. The mother scoops up the crying baby – but who scoops up the crying mother? In a way, the Chair acts as a physical doula of the art world, holding each mother and child. As well as being a chair for feeding, maybe it is also there for a mother to sit and cry out too. (I once screamed at the top of my lungs across a public car park, utterly sleep deprived and despairing at my baby’s endless crying). Perhaps public spaces are only truly welcoming when they can hold that visceral need. Indeed, sometimes love does cry. The Chair’s installation at Chapter boldly challenges us all to think about the visibility of mothering and caregiving; who we think belongs in our public spaces – citizen or seeker, old or young – and what they can do there: love, cry, feed (with breast, bottle, pump or tube). I am confident the Chair will leave behind a safe, cwtch-like space for anyone to be a matrescent creature in all her glory – feeding, crying, laughing, holding – and being held.
Emily Roux is the founder of The Mama Cwtch, a safe space for mothers in Wales to explore their journey through matrescence, the transition to motherhood, and receive practical resources and support in their community.
The Feeding Chair is at Chapter Arts Centre until September 2025, more information on this and the wider Feed tour here. To celebrate World Breastfeeding Week (1-7 August), Chapter are hosting a free screening of Milk Report the Film by Conway and Young, followed by a Q&A with the artists, as well as two free workshops by The Mama Cwtch. Read more about the programme here.
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Published 28.07.2025 by Lara Eggleton in Explorations
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