John Foster attended summer art schools in Auckland in the 1960s and 1970s. It was there he met his wife, Pat, who was a sculptor. He combined life as a dairy farmer with a deep devotion to his artistic practice.

In 1972, John Foster dealt with his anxiety over his daughter’s difficult birth by sketching her delivery at a rural birthing unit. These prints are based on those sketches.

Through simple compositions and bold black lines, Foster conveys the pain and emotion of his wife’s labour and the delivery of his daughter. He later wrote:

Until the moment the baby began to cry, there was the sense of not knowing if everything was going to turn out well … I did not know until then how much love and respect I had for my wife and child.