When Liz Lee and Susie Freeman asked me to collaborate on Recoil, it was in the context of representing approximately two hundred children who could have been conceived and born during the combined years of protection provided by the 35 framed coils in the exhibit.

After trying out a literal interpretation showing 200 children, it occurred to me that I did not have such a mathematical view of conception, but rather had a much more subjective and hazy idea of the whole business. I asked family, friends and colleagues how they visualised the moment of conception and was surprised by answers which ranged from the classic school diagrams of the insides of our bodies during sex and fertilisation to images of fish, solar eclipses, fireworks, flowers, eggs and my favourite, a sticky mess.

I turned these ideas into a collection of hazy images through a combination of video, digital photography and inkjet printing, a process which appeared to mimic the rather distant ideas most people hold around conception.

We had considered accompanying the coils with a video, film or data projection but decided on the prints as a static visual statement. The Recoil video is a collection of some of the original images used to create the prints presented in an impressionistic collage.

David Critchley 20.03.2000