by Michael Pattison

Adapted from their own print work of the same name, Milk Report is an appropriately satirical video performance responding to contemporary assumptions around reproductive labour by artist duo Conway and Young. First published in 2019, the initial pamphlet logged the 720 hours and 7 minutes that Young had spent breastfeeding during her first six months as a parent. Printed as a run of 720, the work sold (and sells) for £8.21 per copy, equating to an hour’s work at National Living Wage (as per 2019) and therefore amounting to a total ‘salary’ of £5916.95.

While this ingenious concept might have naturally formed the basis of a structural film – a seemingly impersonal rendering of lived experience filtered through cold, hard data – the Milk Report movie is a delightfully chaotic affair. Here, Conway and Young take turns to read out a discursive essay, printed alongside the feeding times logged in their publication, while improvising their way through a banana milkshake recipe, downing a four-pint bottle of semi-skimmed cow’s milk, and affixing to their torsos a growing mass of pink kitchen gloves blown up to resemble udders.

Filmed and edited by Roland Turner, Milk Report is an unapologetically British work, not only in its props and wry, high-concept humour, but also due to the political context to which it responds: namely, the comically burdensome stresses of reproductive labour under capitalism, and the gallingly crude, cruelly indifferent and bafflingly unremunerated lens through which the UK government views parents, carers and people who breastfeed. As such, Milk Report fizzes with a barely concealed rage. The deadpan stare with which each artist eyes the camera here embodies a thoroughly unenamoured outlook, an incredulity at the tediously unjust set-up of the UK system.

Part treatise, part experiment, the film straddles a fine line between control and chaos – as if to replicate the precarious rhythms of the reproductive sector’s unpaid labour force, and/or the predictably strange, borderline surreal pile-up of chores that mark the occasion of becoming a new parent. No babies are present in Milk Report’s black-backdropped studio set: the combination of a household blender and canteen-style tray-storage trolley implies a liminal space somewhere between the domestic and the commercial.

Where babies are present is in the two Milk Round (2018/2026) shorts included here alongside Milk Report. In these video performances, filmed by Carol Stevens, Conway and Young breastfeed their children while drinking cow’s milk from a carton – each inhabiting a frame for as long as it takes her to drink the latter. The most direct source of sustenance in human history is implicated in the same profit-driven system that has also mastered the mass production of bovine produce. It’s another neat encapsulation of entangled labours, delivered with a gently confrontational piercing of the fourth wall.