In 2020, during the Covid lockdowns, Salmon was pregnant and gave birth to her first child. Her practice over the previous 17 years had taken her across site-specific projects, material explorations, folklores and mythologies, histories, literature, film and art — with an examination of female sexuality and the female gaze always at its core. Becoming pregnant made that research feel newly urgent. Her longstanding inquiry into the suppression of women's sexuality — and the portrayal of female desire as 'animalistic', 'lunatic', 'monstrous' — took on a different weight. It became essential, personal, something she needed to reclaim not only in her work but in her own experience.

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Addressing sexuality in pregnancy and childbirth, and the taboos surrounding maternal eroticism, Salmon returns to a question posed by artist Anne Phillips: "A sexual act begins motherhood, why would the entire experience not relate back to sexuality?"

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Over the following four years — and two births later — she developed Closing Bones: a work in development comprising hand painted multiple exposure photographs, sculptures, and moving image, the research for which was deepened during Subversive Bodies, a collaborative residency at Hypha Studios in 2024. The work draws on her own experiences of childbirth — a desire to reconnect with a metamorphosing body, with the women who provided care and collective strength, and with the sensations of birth itself: fear, pain, desire, tenderness, violence, euphoria, carnality. Through rituals and practices both collective and solitary, the work returns to the figure of the 'wild woman' — to the primal nature of birth — offering an unapologetic, uncensored representation of female bodies that refuses narrow definitions of the feminine.

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