Art, Abortion and Anti-Choice protestors
A days discussion on abortion hosted by NI group Alliance for Choice and Array Collective, with Dr Pam Lowe and artist Nichola Irvine
Join Array Collective and Alliance for Choice to hear where Northern Ireland is now for abortion access, 2 full years after decriminalisation. What part creative strategies can play and what anti-choice protestors found so offensive about a giant pink Billboard that said "Abortion is Normal".
Danielle Roberts of Alliance for Choice in front of Abortion is Normal Billboard designed by Nichola Irvine, 2021
Designed for age 18+
Naomi Connor is Co-convenor of Alliance for Choice and has been active in the campaign for decriminalisation and since then in pushing for access to legal services. Naomi is also a long-time Trade Union activist. As a woman who was forced to travel from Northern Ireland to England to access abortion services, Naomi has first hand experience of the difficulties that women and pregnant people in NI face when seeking to access abortion healthcare. She is an outspoken advocate of women’s rights and reproductive justice.
Dr Pam Lowe is a senior lecturer in Sociology and Policy at Aston University, Birmingham. She has been researching and publishing in the areas of reproductive and sexual health for over twenty years. She is currently engaged in a longitudinal ethnographic study of abortion debates in public spaces which has examined the street-based activities of anti-abortion activists and organisations and pro-choice counterdemonstrations across the UK. Her latest book, Anti-Abortion Activism in the UK: Ultra-sacrificial Motherhood, Religion and Reproductive Rights in the Public Sphere, written with Dr Sarah-Jane Page, is being published in spring 2022.
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Nichola Irrvine is a freelance Illustrator and 2d animator based in Belfast with a passion for fashion and love of drawing weird and wonderful characters, working in the animation studio Enter Yes Ltd as a illustrator/2d animator. Her work is a mix of traditional and digital and her aesthetic focuses on non-conventional canons of beauty; ugly art and colourful, quirky and often textural shapes. Nichola has worked on a number of projects with Alliance for Choice and her poster is featured in the Array Collective installation "The Druithaib's Ball" in the Turner Prize exhibition at the Herbert Coventry.
Emma Campbell is Co-convenor of Alliance for Choice and member of Array Collective. Emma gained her Documentary Photography BA (Hons) at Newport in 2001, an MFA in Photography at Ulster University in 2012. Her PhD addresses photography as an activist tool, an artist practice and as reflexive academic inquiry in the movement for abortion rights. Inspired by practices employed by the women photography collectives in her historical research, she employs archive images, documentary, film, group performance, found images, street art and collage.
