Research

Over the course of 8 weeks myself and nine other students elected to work in conjunction with Andrei Molodkin as part of his “Fallout Pattern” exhibition. We took over gallery two in RUA RED for the duration of the show. The gallery was our research control room and our workshop. We each worked under the brief set for us by Molodkin to; research hidden documents and structures of control which enable society to function and form a new political language from our findings.

Psychic Numbing

After receiving this brief the topic of data came to mind. Data is now currency. He who holds the data, holds the power. In this way it controls us. But data is illusive, and as Paul Slovic posits in his paper work on Psychic Numbing, “Numerical representations of human lives do not necessarily convey the importance of those lives.”

Paul Slovic (2011) identifies a phenomenon referred to as Psychic Numbing. This theory means that humans are very good at empathising with 1 person, but very bad at empathising with large groups of people. When attempting to relate to large groups we struggle because people are not thought of as individuals anymore, their humanity is stripped and they are just a collective number.

Psychic Numbing angled the direction of my work. With a view reintroduce the human element into data sets and statistics I decided to approach the brief by following two themes:

- Church/State Entanglement in women’s health issues

- Humanising Data

Forced Travel

Thousands of Irish people travel to the UK each year to access abortion services which are illegal in Ireland due to the eighth amendment. This displacement of pregnant women has been prevalent in Ireland since the inception of the Magdeline Laundries - a mother and baby home, funded by the state and run by Nuns, in which mass abusive of women and their children took place - in 1767.

Focused Research

Working around such a sensitive subject, it was important to me that it be handled it in a way that allowed me to feel personally connected to the work - to work from within the issue rather than looking at it from the outside in. For this reason I attended meetings with ROSA, a socialist group who lead a strong campaign to repeal the eighth amendment.

Two weeks into the project myself and five others showed the work at the Tate Modern as part of a public art engagement at the Tate Exchange. Here I gained insight into the opinions and level of knowledge which people outside of Ireland have of the eighth amendment. The project benefited from public interaction as well as collaborative practice with UAL students.

Midway through the exhibition I attended and presented at the panel discussion Activism for Social and Political Change, with panelists Bernadette Devlin Mcaliskey, Lian Bell, Cecily Brennan and Grace Dyas. I gave a brief presentation of the research that had been done and the concepts which had been developed.

Collecting Data on Data

The data on the number of Irish women who travelled from Ireland to access abortion services was collated using gov.co.uk as a resource. The figures from 2016 were used, as they were the most recent ones available. It was discovered that in 1 year 4,5009 women made the journey. The aim was to work with this data in a way which could have a positive effect - to humanise it so that people could empathise with these women.

I started to draw up plans for how the statistucs illustrated, to make the unseen journeys visible. I created a structure which consists of 672 lengths of embroidery thread – a thread for each woman who travelled.

The structure is reminiscent of the jacquard loom, upon which early computers were based. I thought it was interesting to physically represent digital data through a structure which created a mould for how digital software would function. The loom-like structure and embroidery thread also reference the traditional women’s work of crafting.