When they put their hands out like scales
by Emma Campbell
Interview and Text by Sarah Allen
Intro text by Emma Campbell
Originally published in prism #10
 |
| Journeys 17 © 2012 Emma Campbell |
'Power, exercised as control, has blighted the reproductive rights of humans worldwide for centuries. National ideals of motherhood and acceptable female behaviour are threaded through anti-choice arguments. To represent the ‘abortion journey’ experience, in effect it becomes the “fulcrum of a much broader ideological struggle in which the very meanings of family, the state, motherhood, and …women’s sexuality are contested” (Petchesky, Rosalind. Abortion and Women’s Choice: The State, Sexuality and Reproductive Freedom London: Verso1986 pp. 69).
The polemic surrounding abortion is bewildering. In this project ambiguity and conflict are played out in the passing landscapes and impersonal details of the journey to the clinic overseas, echoed by the political bluster and suffocating reality of the legal constrictions. Layers of glass and reflection acknowledge the obfuscatory and morally indignant language used by politicians and anti-choice campaigners. The enforced exile across the sea to the former colonial bosom, shrouded in secrecy and shame, is still one of the few options for women in the island of Ireland. All of these photographs were made sitting by windows during journeys to abortion clinics in Liverpool and London.'
Sarah Allen: Where did the inspiration for this project originate?
Emma Campbell: I was living in London up until 2009 and after spending some time traveling I enrolled in the Photography MFA course at the University of Ulster. It was only when I moved back to Northern Ireland that I properly remembered that abortion was illegal. In London it is available to people on the NHS so there isn't a huge discussion around it. Ireland's legal limbo in relation to abortion seemed very strange to me. So that is really how I arrived at this concept, however I had no idea how I was going to approach the project photographically.
