A yellow rose project

 Drawing upon photographic archives, written accounts of suffragists from the 1920’s and my own personal history, these still life images are constructed as a means to process and connect myself to the past from this present moment.

Some images pair small anecdotes from my own experience coming of age along with historical artifacts in order to subtly fuse time on a table and create a correlation between past action and present choice in reference to reproductive rights.

Other images mark or etch objects with words. ‘Stone message’ is a simulated reproduction of real protest artifacts dating to the 1920’s, objects which were often used during strategic bouts of activism and directed at government institutions and retail shops. Another image stamps the word ‘Just’ into a handmade brick, referencing the bricks used in demonstrations by women during the suffrage movement 100 years ago and the bricks wielded in more recent history with the Black Lives Matter movement. These particular objects were literal and figurative tools of expression used in action against oppression, then and now— a means to amplifying the voice beyond the body.

‘Ethel Byrne, 185 hours, 1917’ is a euphemistic still life image referencing an experience had by a political prisoner during the movement. Byrne was a suffragist, Irish-American, nurse, sister to Margaret Sanger and one of the three Mother’s of what is now known as Planned Parenthood. She was arrested in 1917 for distributing pamphlets on birth control and sentenced to jail for 30 days at Blackwell Island workhouse in New York. Advocating for the legalization of birth control Byrne went on a hunger strike for 185 hours. Authorities quickly put a stop to it and Ethel Byrne became the first woman force fed in the United States. Raw eggs were commonly used as a food to push protein into the body, usually through a tube down the throat or the nose. Often flowers and pins were given to women, who earned their time in prison for the cause, and they were bestowed upon them by other suffragists once released for their courage.