Film Launch: The Only One

Join us at The Library of Birmingham for the launch of The Only One (2025), a newly commissioned video and sound work by composer Hannah Conway, now acquired by the Birth Rites Collection.

Co-created with writer Hazel Gould, Professor Anna David, and women with lived experience of cervical scans, the work draws on interviews with patients and staff at preterm birth clinics in the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Wing at University College Hospital London. The aria is voiced by a fictional patient and explores experiences of internal vaginal ultrasound scans used to measure the cervix and assess the risk of preterm birth.

Following the screening join Hannah Conway, Professor Anna David, Birth Rites Collection curator Helen Knowles, and artist Sally Butcher for a conversation about creative health, collaboration, and the role of art in shaping cultures of care across clinical and civic spaces.

The film is co-commissioned by the Tommy’s National Centre for Preterm Birth Research, Imperial College London and the Birth Rites Collection. The Only One also forms part of a training resource for midwives, integrating artistic practice into healthcare education.

About the speakers

Sally Butcher is an artist, researcher and (m)other, whose interdisciplinary practice uses printmaking, drawing and writing to explore lived experience. She is currently completing her funded PhD: (In)Fertile Embodiment: Revealing the Traces of Infertility between the Medical and Maternal through Feminist Art Practice, using language, bodily ‘data’ and archive as modes of enquiry (across Birmingham School of Art and De Montfort Centre of Reproduction Research, with a placement at Wellcome Collection). Her recent writings are published in Studies in the Maternal (2024) and Barren (2025).   

Hannah Conway is an internationally award-winning composer recognised for her dynamic collaboration with diverse and under-represented communities in 18 countries to create new music and stories. As Artistic Director of Sound Voice she makes live and immersive musical works collaborating with people with lived experience and the healthcare, scientific, biomedical and technology sectors. Recognition for her work includes an Ivor Novello Academy Award, Classical:NEXT Innovation Award, best non-fiction immersive work at Sheffield Doc Fest Alternate Realities Award and European FEDORA Digital Prize 2023.  

Anna David is Director of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Institute for Women’s Health at University College London (UCL) in London and a Consultant in Obstetrics and Maternal Fetal Medicine at UCL Hospital. Clinically she specializes in high risk pregnancy, prevention and treatment of preterm birth and fetal medicine. She is Deputy Director of the Tommy’s National Centre for Preterm Birth Research.   

Helen Knowles is an artist, curator and director of the Birth Rites Collection which she founded in 2009 following the premier of an exhibition of collaborative commissions at the Glasgow Science Centre and Manchester Museum in 2008. Knowles has a BA Hons from Glasgow School of Art, an MFA Fine Art from Goldsmiths University and a PHD from the University of Northumbria. Her collaborative, new media art and curatorial practice has included working with indigenous communities in Putumayo, Colombia and Santa Fe, America. As well as medics, midwives, scientists, lawyers, market sellers, oligarchs, crypto currency and blockchain specialists. She was recently nominated for the Jarman Moving Image Award.