by Bonnie Collings
With the aim of breaking down taboos and encouraging discussion around human biology and childbirth, local artist Rebecca Vandyk-Hamilton and her giant placenta sculpture will travel to Denmark this week to prepare for an exhibition at the Aarhus University Science Museum.

Completed in 2019, the giant placenta sculpture is made out of 900 recycled t-shirts and weighs around 150 kilograms. The massive piece has served as a catalyst for conversation and education about the placenta, childbirth and motherhood.
Rebecca said the idea of the sculpture came to her when she was investigating the concept of blood.
"Very early on in 2017, I looked at a new gallery that was opening in Melbourne, the Science Gallery, they put a call out for artworks that looked at the concept of blood," she said.
"I wanted to look back and think (about) when as a human do you start making blood? I assumed at the time it probably just comes from the mother, but after doing a lot of research I learnt that it's impossible for the mother and baby's blood to mix because that would cause an immune response and the baby would be lost. Hence the placenta, which is sort of a go-between."
Rebecca said once she learnt more about the placenta, she felt compelled to teach more people about it.
"When I found out how amazing it (the placenta) was as an organ that we grow just for the purpose of making a baby, I thought wow, why don't we know more about it?" she said.
"I figured that it was probably a situation where (if I didn't know much about the placenta) then most of my other mums at mothers' groups and even our own mothers and grandmothers possibly didn't know much about it either, they just hoped for the best and let the midwife and nature do their thing. So, I decided to make a really giant one!"
From developing the idea to the first exhibition, the giant placenta sculpture took two years to create. Rebecca said she had about 30 women and a couple of men help create the sculpture.
Not wanting to use new materials if she could avoid it, Rebecca decided to create her project out of completely recycled materials. The Mawarra Disability Services Op-Shop provided t-shirts which were washed, dyed and then turned into yarn to create the sculpture.
"We used about 900 t-shirts all up," Rebecca said. "We would get all the old t-shirts, wash them and then re-seam them into a tube so they could be made into yarn. I made up knitting packs for people that wanted to make sections. It took months to put it into the final construction."
Once it was completed, the sculpture was displayed at Factory One in Warragul, before going on tour across Australia.
Some of the major tour stops included a display at Sydney University for a conference by The Australian Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (AMIRCI), the National Midwives' Conference in Canberra and the Hudson Institute for Medical Research.
The placenta was planned to be on display at the 2020 Women of the World Conference in Brisbane. But when the world shut down due to COVID-19, the sculpture was packed up, ready and waiting for its next adventure.
Rebecca said the community's response to the sculpture was positive and prompted storytelling.
"Some of those stories were sad, but most of them were amazing," she said. "(They were) stories that are only amazing in the retelling because most of the time when you fall pregnant or birth a child you always assume and hope that it's all going to go well."
Rebecca said the sculpture also caused some "controversy and questioning."
"A placenta has an icky response," she said. "(People say) 'we don't need to know about that, we don't need to hear about those things.' I get it, humans have a disgust response to anything that's icky, for good reason, our bodies try to protect us from an inherent threat. But there's no threat in the word, we're quite safe to discuss these things. I liked that (the sculpture) had some of that (type of) response, because it meant it was doing a good job of starting discussions."
After the sculpture gained international exposure on social media, Rebecca was invited to exhibit the giant placenta at the Aarhus University Science Museum in Denmark.
Rebecca left for Denmark yesterday (October 21) and is set to stay for three weeks, running art workshops and potentially adding more to the sculpture with the help of the local arts community.
"I'll possibly be doing some arts education workshops that look at principles of science that are sometimes difficult to understand with science speak and turning them into something that is easy to understand through arts activities," she said.
Feeling a mixture of sadness and pride at the sculpture's departure, Rebecca hoped the giant placenta will continue to spark conversations and learning.
The sculpture will stay in Denmark at the Aarhus University Science Museum to be exhibited during 2025 and into 2026.