Speaking of silence, speaking of art, abortion and Ireland by Suzanna Chan
ABSTRACT
Sounding the Depths a collaborative installation by Pauline Cummins and Louise Walsh, 1992 reclaimed the female body appropriated by the Eight Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland and symbolically opened it up to speak and even laugh in defiance of patriarchal and heteronormative definitions of “woman”. First exhibited in 1992, the artwork was addressed to the silencing of women about abortion and other denigrated bodily experiences in a deeply repressive social and political climate. More recent artworks which challenge how women’s reproductive bodies are controlled by the state evidence the continued relevance of these themes as related to the Irish contexts, North and South. This essay considers how art and contemporary pro-choice arts activism explores ways of “saying the unsayable” when abortion is criminalised, stigmatised and largely experienced secretly and silently, to transform its symbols and discourse.
Access to piece is here https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2018.1560892
An extract from the piece is below:
Called to account: “when they put out their hands like scales; journeys”
“Artist and activist Emma Campbell’s photo series When They Put Out Their Hands Like Scales; Journeys (W.T.P.O.T.H.L.S; Journeys) was photographed in 2012 as she travelled from Belfast, Northern Ireland to abortion clinics in Liverpool, Manchester and London. Campbell created images of the journeys rather than the women who make them because she wanted to avoid “making photographs of victims.”73 Rather than using photography to fetishise the photographed person by reducing her to a single image without context, she establishes what Ariella Azoulay, in her theorisation of photography, conceives as a social relation. Azoulay’s approach to photography has less to do with the photograph itself than with the set of relations within which it is produced and consumed. These are relations between the photographer, the person who is photographed, the location, and a viewer who is summoned to take responsibility for what she sees in the image.74 W.T.P.O.T.H.L.S; Journeys is located between Belfast and British abortion clinics, and connects Campbell’s proxy for the women who travel with a viewer who enters a relation of accountability to the images of the journeys. We are also accountable to those who could not have been photographed, the many women who cannot leave Northern Ireland for an abortion because they lack the support, money or documentation to permit travel. Each photograph can also suggest the subjectivity and interiority of the woman who travelled to the clinics, and is overlaid with our own associations.”
