Doing it For Ourselves
Installation at NARS Foundation, June 2021
Self Help Clinic Page 2, 3 and 4 are machine embroidered reproductions of a medical “Self-Help” article first printed in “Everywoman,” an underground feminist newspaper (Venice, CA 1971). Using detailed photos and text, the article instructs women in conducting pelvic exams and “Menstrual Extraction,” a euphemism for self-administered early-term abortions. This article was published two years before the landmark Roe v. Wade supreme court decision that made abortion legal in the US, but it evokes the tenuous status of safe, legal abortion, and reproductive rights in the US today.
Women Looking/Camera Woman is part of a series of custom wallpaper designs based on images found in radical feminist publications from the early 1970's. During my research I found multiple conversations about the revolutionary potential of new, accessible, media like the Portapak video camera, Cable and Public Access TV, which were, in some ways, precursors to today’s social media.