As You Were is an experimental documentary made in conversation with midwives and obstetricians from the UK’s National Health Service.
As You Were (2024).
50min, HD, colour, stereo. Eng w/ closed captions. [German subtitles available].
How do our private experiences inform our professional selves that through our institutions impact the lives of others?
As You Were was made in conversation with maternity specialists from the UK’s National Health Service who have given birth themselves to query the boundaries of professional, personal and institutional understanding.
Footage of historical maternity artefacts from the archives at the Royal College of Surgeons physically situate these questions. These objects intersect with scenes of a coxed (instructed) women’s rowing team and intimate documentation of insect life and the artist’s domestic realm.
The film is also entangled with Mann’s own experiences of matrescence in art and academia.
above: As You Were, (2024, video still).
cont.
Institutions borrow from our personal lives and co-opt the language of mothering as ‘practices of care’. Yet for their duration pregnancy and birth are processes of transformation for the individual and such embodied acts of non-institutional behaviour place us outside the dominant culture.
As You Were creates a space of listening about the ways that institutional practices permeate our personal lives, examining this lineage through women’s healthcare. The film asks if there is an institutional context where such transformative embodied experiences might be imagined as a benefit to practice.
Second camera: Minttu Mäntynen; Sound design: Tom Drew; Drone: John Duncan; Colour grading: Sebastian Bürkner; Rowing sound recording: Pete Smith.
As You Were installed at the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, March 2025.
The film features in the following publications:
• No Babies, No Boobs, No Bumps. Lyndsay Mann in conversation with Calum Neill at the Fruitmarket gallery, with an introduction by Ruth Bretherick, Mother Lines, Tate Research Papers, (Spring 2026).
• Birth knowledge and institutional experiences: Lyndsay Mann’s As You Were’. Essay by Dr Camilla Røstvik (NO), in Art & the Critical Medical Humanities, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming 2025).
• In Living Colour: Realism and Abstraction in Anatomical Models of the Female Reproductive Body, 1880–1900. Essay by Prof Jessica Dandona (US) in Art & the Critical Medical Humanities, (as above).
As You Were was made possible by the generous support of Creative Scotland; Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh; Surgeons’ Hall Museums; The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh; and NHS Lothian Midwifery Research Network.
As You Were developed from, New Mothers’ Assembly (2019) a series of workshops I devised for first-time new mothers. More info here > https://www.lyndsaymann.com/projects/new-mothers-assembly
As You Were, video still
As You Were, video still
As You Were installed at Fruitmarket gallery warehouse. Image courtesy Fruitmarket, Edinburgh.
As You Were, video still
As You Were, video still
As You Were, video still
As You Were installed at Fruitmarket gallery warehouse. Image courtesy Fruitmarket, Edinburgh.
As You Were installed at Fruitmarket gallery warehouse. Image courtesy Fruitmarket, Edinburgh.
As You Were, video still
As You Were, video still
As You Were, video still
Image courtesy Fruitmarket: in-conversation with Calum Neill.