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Sophia Xeros-Constantinides
Sophia Xeros-Constantinides is a mother of two children, an artist and a medical practitioner, working in Melbourne, Australia, in the area of psychological medicine, where she consults with university students and with new mothers and their babies. Whilst working at Maroondah Hospital’s Eastern Health Child and Youth Mental Health Service, she co-led the ‘PAIRS Mother–Infant Therapy Group Program’ and continues to co-facilitate the ‘CONNECT’ art therapy groups with enhanced maternal and child health nurses in the outer eastern area of Melbourne. Her training in fine art has combined with her clinical experience to bear on her visual research into the darker side of motherhood. Her studio-based Ph.D. examined the history of visualization of women’s reproductive experiences and the ways in which fear, anxiety and the monstrous were encoded in visual imagery of women’s reproductive bodies through the ages. In her own visual research, Sophia represents the procreative body, using collage as metaphor for the ‘un-doingness’ experienced by many pregnant and birthing women.