Speaking of silence, speaking of art, abortion and Ireland by Suzanna Chan

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

ShowEmma CampbellJune 7, 2021review, journal, academic, Jesse Jones, Pauline Cummings, performance, art, women, Ireland, abortiton

Judges’ Troubles: The Northern/Irish Feminist Judgment Project

For the duration of the festival an exhibition of photographs by Emma Campbell documenting journeys to abortion clinics in Liverpool and London 'When they put their hands out like scales — Journeys' is at Framewerk, 10 Upper Newtownards Road, Belfast, Tues March 8—Sat March 12.

ShowEmma CampbellJuly 26, 2018art, academic, university

HOW TO CAPTURE THE 8TH AMENDMENT

This acknowledgement of one’s pain is tightly connected to the acknowledgment of one’s right to be protected from that pain – whether you think such pain belongs to the unborn or the women. The fact is women’s pain is a tricky subject to visualize: how do you illustrate the mental distress a woman can feel when facing a pregnancy she cannot take upon herself? How do you show the shame, loneliness and anxiety brought by having to travel overseas to terminate it? How do you picture the inner, physical and mental pain you can go through when having an abortion, especially in secrecy, with post-care being complicated? The silence surrounding abortion in Ireland echoes the visual blackout of women’s pain.

InterviewEmma CampbellJuly 26, 2018art, activism, academic, abortion, Ireland

HOW CAN A STATE CONTROL SWALLOWING?

Perhaps most fundamentally, medical abortion poses serious challenges for the enforcement of any prohibition of abortion, raising serious issues for detection, proof and prosecution. 'How', asks one commentator, 'can a state control swallowing'?

BookEmma CampbellJuly 26, 2018academic, art, activism, pills

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