Artificial Womb feminist arts zine
Feb/March 21
FREE #45 (£3 solidarity price, give the money to the zine seller)
What Sparks Outrage Is Difficult To Anticipate On the murders of Sarah Everard, Bennylyn Burke, and others Did you hear about how police violently broke up a vigil at Clapham Common in south London the other day? The peaceful protest was for Sarah Everard, who was murdered on the 3 March, 2021 (ironically a few days before International Women’s Day and the week before Mother’s Day). She had been walking home and had passed through Clapham Common when a serving police officer kidnapped and killed her. Two days before that Bennylyn Burke and her two children were reported missing, with the older daughter eventually found at a house in Dundee. The owner of the house is believed to have bludgeoned Burke to death with a hammer, before burying her body and that of her two-year-old daughter Jellica - in his basement under several feet of concrete. The vigil at Clapham Common attracted a large police presence. On the pretence that it was flouting lockdown restrictions, the officers manhandled and arrested protesters and stomped on flowers that had been laid in remembrance of Everard and women like Burke. After Everard disappeared police told women in the local area to stay at home and be extra careful walking in the area at night. But how much more careful can women possibly be? Everard was wearing bright, practical clothing and flat shoes and spent some of the journey on the phone to her boyfriend. Putting the onus on women takes the blame away from where it actually should lie – at the feet of the men who harass, stalk and murder women. Every year on International Women’s Day Jess Phillips, shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding and Labour MP for Birmingham Yardle, reads a list of all the women killed by men in the last year in the UK. The list is collated by Karen Ingala Smith and has never fallen below 100. This year Everard and Burke are both included. But what’s striking is that between their names are four other women also killed at the beginning of this month. Samantha Heap was found dead at her murderer’s house on the 2 March, Geetika Goyal was stabbed in the street on the 4 March, Imogen Bohajczuk was found dead at her murderer’s house on 4 March, and teenager Wenjing Xu was attacked while working at her family’s takeaway on 5 March. On the 10 March Baroness Jones of the Green Party suggested a curfew for men in the House of Lords. She said; “In the week that Sarah Everard was abducted and, we suppose, killed... I argue that, at the next opportunity for any Bill that is appropriate, I might put in an amendment to create a curfew for men on the streets after 6pm. I feel this would make women a lot safer, and discrimination of all kinds would be lessened…Nobody makes a fuss 2 | Artificial Womb #45
when, for example, the police suggest women stay home. But when I suggest it, men are up in arms.” Of course this idea has been met with widespread incredulity and outrage. How dare someone suggest that men should change their behaviour or make a small sacrifice as a show of solidarity. Social media is also awash with people questioning why Everard’s death has hit the headlines and provoked vigils and protests when Burke, Heap, Goyal, Bohajczuk and Xu have not. But what sparks outrage is difficult to anticipate. When Bennylyn Burke and her daughter Jellica were murdered I felt helpless, especially since their murder happened a few streets up from the house I grew up in. It made me feel sick to think something like this could happen in my hometown. And while I refreshed my social media feeds all day, desperate for some update, it seemed like a post or hashtag would be a meaningless action. What could I do? A heartfelt post won’t bring them back or help her surviving daughter. Burke and her daughter were killed in a domestic setting, and like Heap and Bohajczuk the violence happened in their perpetrator’s home. We can lie to ourselves about domestic violence, distancing ourselves from the idea that it could happen to us. But when a case like Everard’s happens it forces us to confront the reality of how vulnerable we really are; she was just walking home. She had done everything ‘right’ and she was still killed, by a serving police officer no less. And this makes some of us angry. It’s cumulative. As more people express outrage you feel more empowered to say something. You dare to imagine that things might change. The response of women around the country to Everard’s death is not a sign that we didn’t care about the others, but a sign that we care so much we can’t contain our collective grief and fear and anger any longer. The idea of a curfew for men might sound absurd, and in a way it is. There are also valid concerns that it might put trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people in more danger than they already are. But consider the thought for a moment. As we celebrate International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day – how can we ensure that one day there are no names at all for Jess Phillips to read out? Can there ever be a year where absolutely no women are killed by men?
Ana Hine
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Clare Forrest
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Amanda Gorman and the Collective Accountability of a Nation
There’s a universal consensus that Amanda Gorman stole the show at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration. Her accomplishments are remarkable – at 22, she’s the youngest board member of 826 National (the largest youth writing network in the United States) and has three books coming out. But what I loved about her reading that day, and have grown to love about her work, is its quiet power. Her work is brimming with lines that demand the listener to not just hear the words, but to immediately engage with the content as she speaks. Gorman’s reading transformed the inauguration into a place for collective accountability. After it was clear that Biden would take office, I noticed a sizeable amount of middle-class Democrats expressing the same sentiment: “Thank god I don’t have to care about politics anymore”. While I couldn’t be happier that Biden won the election, I’m sure that many of the Democrats who watched the inauguration that day were the ones who wanted to retreat back into their shells, as if the last four years were simply an anomaly. Everyone seemed to be moved by Gorman’s reading of The Hill We Climb, but I hope that the awe she inspired in people that day grips them, urging them not to become complacent again. The hill we climb is not a hill the President gets us over once the voting is over, but a hill we are collectively accountable for climbing, which we must remember is not restrictive to the United States in the slightest. By asking us to be “brave enough to be [the light]” at the end of her poem, Gorman reminds us that civic engagement does not begin and end with voting, and that the kind of engagement that strengthens lives goes deeper than
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politics – at a first glance, the climbing of the hill could have been dismissed as a completed action now that we have a Democrat president in the White House. But, to Amanda Gorman, the hill we climb is the “victory” that lies in “all the bridges we’ve made”. One of Gorman’s other poems, The Miracle of Morning, was written early on in the COVID-19 pandemic and is all about unity in collective pain through small acts of kindness. People “ignite not in the light, but in lack thereof”, a parallel with “For there is always light // If only we’re brave enough to see it // If only we’re brave enough to be it”. Even after you elect the “right” president, it is still your job to hold them accountable, and this cannot be done on an individual level. Gorman illustrates that the kind of action that touches lives is on the individual level of kindness, and that “in suffering, we must find solidarity”. Gorman says that the United States “…isn’t broken, // but simply unfinished”. It’s so much easier to give up on something by saying that it’s damaged beyond repair, and Gorman’s work insists that this is not the case. There is strength in “striving to forge our union with purpose” while being “far from polished, far from pristine”. There is strength in knowing that things aren’t perfect, but still making a collective effort, trying to finish what is unfinished, because it is not broken and there is still hope. Gorman sees that fear of failure is pervasive and that there is a sort of shame in having to build a country up, instead focusing on what we will make it. “We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be,” she says in The Hill We Climb, and in The Miracle of Morning she calls on all of us to “not ignore the pain. Give it purpose. Use it”. When people say Amanda Gorman inspires hope, I don’t see “hope” being used to mean the type of passive optimism characterised by “oh, it’ll all be okay now” or “someone else will save us”. Gorman describes herself as a “change-maker”, and to me, the “hope” she inspires is the notion that now Biden is in power our climb is a little less taxing. But we still have just as far to go and we should be collectively working just as hard to get the change we want. It is our job to remember that we are still climbing today. In her poem In This Place (An American Lyric), Gorman describes the collections in the “noble building” of the Library of Congress as “burned and reborn twice”. There is nothing naive about her hope for the future, because Gorman’s version of hope is active, and she knows that there is no shame in admitting a country’s flaws and rebirthing it through collective action and accountability, as many times as it takes for “our people, diverse and beautiful, [to] emerge, battered and beautiful”.
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The Honesty of the Money Shot: An Interview With Hannah Beresford Would you open an OnlyFans account for your art practice? Gray’s School of Art master’s student Hannah Beresford’s increasingly sexually explicit paintings [1.] have led her to the platform, the first artist we’ve come across using the site in such a way. Here she talks to Ana Hine about the role of the artist in the sex industry, how sexuality influences subject, and the apocryphal story of Susanna and the Elders. As your work has become more focused on sex, sexuality and pornography have you found it harder to navigate the art world? Definitely. I’ve struggled to enter, let alone navigate, the art world because I have very low confidence. The explicit sexuality of my work makes it harder because I find myself thinking, “Why even submit for this exhibition/funding/etc because they will reject it due to the content”. At the same time, it’s impossible for me to not focus on sex, because it’s almost a compulsion to explore this subject, and anything else doesn’t feel like a true reflection of who I am and what I do. How does your sexuality guide your eye? I think I look to images that I can relate to. I’m bisexual but so much of my sexuality has been shaped by heterosexual society, culture and aesthetics. So rather than reject the aesthetics of hetero porn for example, I look to embrace it and explore its meanings and the imprints that it leaves on the individual and also within the wider visual landscape. I’m sure that a bi girl growing up today is going to be able to find porn that is feminist and queer and that is going to guide her eye differently to someone like me who grew up in the 90s and found their sexuality by watching Verhoeven’s Showgirls (which despite what the critics say is a beautiful, complex and interesting film that continues to positively influence me). Is ‘She Went In As Before’ [2.] cut off at the bottom or is that a photographic crop? The composition cuts off at the bottom; I was trying to be suggestive rather than explicit by not showing the important part but I don’t like the outcome – I’ve learnt that suggestive doesn’t work for me, I much prefer the honesty of the money shot. Can you briefly recount the story of Susanna and the Elders? What attracted you to the story? Is the story going to be the core focus of your MFA?
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Susanna and The Elders is a Biblical story about a woman who is spied upon and lusted after by men. One day when alone in her garden, two local elders accost her and proposition her for sex, with the threat that if she says no, they will accuse her of adultery and she will be put to death. Susanna refuses their advances, and is put on trial where she is saved by Daniel (the story is an apocryphal tale in the Book of Daniel). Susanna’s part in the story illustrates issues of consent, voyeurism, patriarchal misogyny, borders crossed and violated. This is compounded by her appearance in art history, with male painters using her situation to titillate their presumably male viewers and patrons. Susanna has become the core focus of my MFA, giving my pornographic paintings context as I focus on Susanna in her garden without men, free to enjoy her body and sexuality without their threat of violence. What do you think the role of the artist in the sex industry is? In general, I’m unsure what the role of the artist is in any context, and can only speak to my own objectives. I see my paintings as observational, in that they relay information found in our wider visual culture, but through a personal lens in that they are about my own connections and personal reflections on those visuals. I think the sex industry is so rich and varied and is such an important part of our culture that is often maligned, overlooked, or not taken seriously as worthy of study or recognition. I also think it’s important to be an ally for all sex workers and content creators, and recognise the injustices faced by people working within the industry. Why have you decided to use OnlyFans as an artist? How do you use it as an artist? Is it working the way you hoped? I started the OnlyFans account because Instagram was removing some of my posts and stories, so I needed a platform that wouldn’t censor me. OnlyFans also seemed a good idea because it relates directly to the themes of my work and the changing ways people interact with and seek out adult content online. I haven’t found a way to get followers though, and I suspect having the link in my Insta bio limits the reach of my Instagram posts. It’s designed to almost be an invite only sort of thing. So, if you know someone’s OF link because you know them/are already a “fan” then it’s fine, but it’s very hard to connect with accounts that might interest you. I think it helps protect creators, so if I was selling nudes for example, people with bad intentions would find it harder to locate my content. It doesn’t work too well for my use of platform, but it works for other people. I subscribe to a few sex workers, who already have a large platform/ fan base so it works well for them to sell their content direct or have an income from subscriptions, but I don’t follow any other traditional visual artists on there.
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Ottavio Leoni, Susanna and the Elders, ca. 1620
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Have you been using the faces of other Susannas from art history as references for your pieces? Which paintings do you find yourself returning to again and again? Yes, I do a lot of drawings and paintings of Susanna’s face [3.] taken from historical paintings – I have sketchbooks full of her. Initially I found the best way to understand these paintings was to replicate them, but the more I draw Susanna the more I feel close to her, like she’s a friend or relative or even myself. The Susanna project has really made art personal for me in a way that I’d always tried to avoid, because I think it’s so easy to connect with the universality of her story. There are just so many interesting paintings of her from art history, but one of my favourites is by Tintoretto because it has Susanna gazing at her own reflection, spied on by the Elders as well as the viewer – we watch the Elders watching Susanna watching herself. How do you balance your Forget-Me-Not paintings and your Alien Hole pornographic ones? Are we likely to see naked women frolicking in a wildflower meadow anytime soon? Is this partly why you’ve started to paint on glass, to allow the purchaser of the work to place it in their garden? The Forget-Me-Not paintings are purely commercial, and also are a relaxing distraction from my more ‘serious’ Alien Hole paintings – who doesn’t enjoy a nice watercolour? In contrast the pornographic paintings are the ones that are a true reflection of myself and come from my heart. I paint on perspex, and this allows the image to change context depending on how/where it is displayed – it also creates slight surface reflections so the viewer can see themselves ‘looking’ at the image and maybe reflect on the role of their own gaze. By placing the Susanna outside, it references her story taking place in her garden. I’m still at a stage of deciding how to display my Susanna paintings, or if the final outcomes might be more installation based. Where can folk buy your work? They can’t. It probably comes down to the confidence issue again, in that I haven’t offered my pornographic paintings for sale. However, if someone was interested in buying anything, or working with me towards a specific outcome, they can contact me through my Insta. Beresford’s work can be found on Instagram at @h.j.beresford and @ alienholehannah. Her OnlyFans can be found at onlyfans.com/alienholehannah (though if you haven’t used the site before you do need a credit card to sign up, but you won’t be charged for viewing Beresford’s work).
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Top10 Truly Unmissable Films Of 2020 We all know 2020 was a difficult year for cinema; theatres shut down, releases delayed, film festivals worldwide cancelled or rebranded as online events. In response, we have seen the rise in popularity of streaming platforms and video on-demand, which have been a way for us to connect to cinema from the safety of our homes. For these reasons, making a list of my 10 favourite films of 2020 has been challenging, but a few stood out to me for their artistic value and content. This list is by no means exhaustive and it represents only my own personal taste, but I believe some of these titles to be truly unmissable for all cinema lovers. 1. WOLFWALKERS What can I say, Cartoon Saloon did it again. This once small Kilkenny-based animation studio who previously gifted us with masterpieces such as ‘The Song Of The Sea’ brought us a beautiful story about friendship, environmentalism and integration, intertwined with breath-taking animation. A true gem of 2020. 2. RIALTO One of the releases I had been most looking forward to. Written by Mark O’Halloran (Adam & Paul, Garage) ‘Rialto’ explores masculinity, sexuality, incommunicability and mental health in a profound, sometimes painful, and poetic way. Striking in its realism and deeply introspective, this film is another masterpiece from O’Halloran. 3. ORDINARY LOVE Directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn, who previously brought us ‘Good Vibrations’, this delicate, incisive film portrays the lives of a mature couple confronted with illness. Honest and at times disarming, ‘Ordinary Love’ concentrates on the value of everyday life, encouraging us to give meaning and bring awareness to every breathing moment. 4. THE SOCIAL DILEMMA Although at times generalising and surface level, this documentary is an interesting and much needed dive into the reality of social media consumption and its implications in our lives. Perhaps by understanding the extent of our emotional and economic exploitation by social media corporations some change can start happening. But how much of our convenience and comfort are we happy to renounce?
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5. THE TRUTH (La Vérité) The moment I heard that Hirokazu Kore-eda would direct a film in France starring none less than Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, I could hardly contain myself. ‘The Truth’ is not only a beautiful exploration of a mother-daughter relationship but its amazingly crafted storyline makes us reflect on the value of memories, our perception of ourselves through age, and what it means to grow old. Unmissable. 6. PARASITE (Gisaengchung) The only ‘film with subtitles’ to dominate multiplexes in 2020 after winning 4 Oscars, Bong Joon-ho’s latest work is a thought-provoking investigation of contemporary South-Korea, but it easily stretches over hyper-capitalism in general. When the socio-economical gap is profound enough, do we even see each other? 7. ANOTHER ROUND (Druk) In a remarkable portrayal of male friendship against the backdrop of contemporary Denmark, Thomas Vinterberg’s latest film asks uncomfortable questions, leaving us to draw our own conclusions. What role does alcohol have in our lives? How much are we truly ourselves in our personal and social interactions? How much of who we really are is sacrificed for the sake of respectability? An essential watch. 8. ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (Om Det Oändliga) I am a big fan of Roy Andersson and his cruel and yet proudly ironic portraits of the human condition. His latest work (released online although crying out for the big screen) is another masterpiece of filmmaking. Choosing a slightly more linear style than its predecessors, this film is narrated to us by an omniscient observer and her voice somehow soothes the despair of what is presented in front of us. She brings us to each scene and comes back to take our hand, accompanying us through the loneliness, pain and poetry of life. 9. ATHLETE A This documentary about the abusive USA Gymnastic’s doctor Larry Nassar asks important questions for Western society as a whole. How much do we trust the system? How much are we willing to question and to listen? How much do we fall victim of ideals without questioning the ideologies presented to us? A courageous and thought-provoking piece of work. 10. THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE As a filmmaker myself, I could not exclude this title from my list. This is a film that has been 15 years in the making (a journey portrayed in the documentary ‘Lost In La Mancha’). Finally released in Ireland in 2020, ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’ is led by a larger-than-life Jonathan Pryce and it’s a truly enjoyable, beautifully crafted Terry Gilliam film.
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Chiara Viale
Scotland’s Missing People With our interconnected digital lives and technology like Facebook’s Live Location function on Messenger and the Find My app on iPhones it’s easy to forget that people can – and do – just vanish. The majority of missing people in Scotland are men – ranging from teenage boys to the frail and elderly – and they outnumber missing women by a substantial margin. While 75% of people reported missing are found within 24 hours, a small percentage are considered “long-term missing”. There are currently forty white men missing in Scotland, eight white women, two women of colour, and one man of colour – Thanh Van Bui, who was last seen boarding a train for England in Glasgow Central Station when he was fifteen. Their faces are printed below. Their names and images are sourced from www.missingpeople.org.uk and Police Scotland.
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