JG: What have you gleaned from the experience of making this work? How has it changed you personally and as an artist? Where to next?

AS: While art tends to raise more questions than it answers, these works do relate to the urgent conversations taking place right now in America and here in Aotearoa. Making a body of work that resonates with the incredible capacity of the female body and how contemporary society attempts to control it, and then exhibiting that work in the US with its polarised history of body politics, activism, and protests around abortion rights, has been an at once challenging and galvanizing experience.

The series has also changed how I approach my practice and how I make photographs. It has opened up tremendous new opportunities for conversations to take place outside of Aotearoa, and has been a bit of a gateway series for me in that regard. I am deeply disturbed by the repealing of women’s rights being attempted right now via the ‘heartbeat bills’, and the spectre of this regression and its real-life impact on the lives of individuals, both women and men. These are the difficult conversations that spin around the work. It’s a complex set of problems and I think that’s an interesting place from which to operate and to produce art. It’s not just complex in the US either; Aotearoa is in the process of attempting to remove abortion from the Crimes Act, and as the bill had its first reading in Parliament, all the old arguments keep coming out of the ministerial woodwork. Some of our “statesmen” politicians are looking very tarnished in light of their responses.

As you will have heard, we have a Prime Minister who brought her baby (born during her term as Prime Minister) to the UN, a move that made many intensely proud. However, we have our own deep failings, which include underfunded women’s health treatments, a history of botched cervical screening protocols, and a legacy of casually incarcerating women in asylums.

I have several new projects in development; the most recent is the outcome of my long artistic engagement with the lives and actions of women who have transgressed, and the ways that their narratives and histories have been controlled and communicated through visual representation, particularly in Western art and photography. I am especially engaged with the ongoing impacts of these “habits of vision” as they endure and resonate in the contemporary context.

The longer I am involved in researching and making artworks, the more questions I have, and the more manifold and interconnected the threads of my enquiry become, circling back to link to my earlier concerns, while also stretching out into the future. These new images will investigate the medical and social misrepresentation of women through a series of large-scale still-life photographs and a recurring performance. Each image will present at first as a prodigious arrangement of incongruous plants and other materials. Individual photographs will be correlated with a historic or contemporary female archetype; in the symbolic form of the arrangement, its vessel and plant matter, and metaphorically through the title. This layered visual ontology will be channelled through startling, visually uncouth and wanton arrangements of elements such as thorny plant matter, smoke, and fabric. Through their engagement with archetypes, these images will draw on the emblematic symbolism of Enlightenment and European Renaissance art and more recently photography. Larger than previous works, and more out of control than ordered, each image in the series will address and resemble the aesthetic and conceptual register of its related history.

Disclaimer: This work is not intended as medical advice. Do not ingest these plants, as they are poisonous and can be deadly.