On the road to Limerick from the airport, you can see two huge billboards funded by a Christian lobby group. One shows a foetus at 11 weeks’ gestation with the words “one of us”. Another shows a man saying he would never forget what he saw while working in an operating theatre where abortions were taking place (though the poster implies he was a nurse, the hospital revealed he was a porter). It is six weeks until the referendum in Ireland on whether the eighth amendment to the constitution – which essentially gave a foetus the same rights as the woman carrying it – should be repealed, and the campaigning on both sides is intensifying.

One of the groups involved is the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment. On Friday, they will stage a procession through the streets as part of the opening of Limerick’s biennial art festival, EVA International. Pointedly, it will start at the city’s art college, housed in a former Magdalene laundry – the workhouse where “promiscuous” or “fallen” women were sent.

Unfinished business … Alice Maher, Cecily Brennan and Rachel Fallon at the Source Arts Centre, Thurles. Photograph: Patrick Bolger/The Guardian

The campaign began in 2015, following Ireland’s referendum that legalised same-sex marriage. “The eighth amendment has always been unfinished business for every feminist,” says one of the founders, painter and sculptor Cecily Brennan. As an art student, she campaigned during the 1983 referendum that brought the amendment in. She has come with one of her co-founders, painter and sculptor Alice Maher, and we are sitting in an empty room above the EVA offices, in a beautiful Georgian building.

They now have more than 3,500 signatories from every arts discipline in Ireland, including high-profile supporters such as writers Anne Enright and Edna O’Brien and actor Saoirse Ronan. “Immediately it opened, artists were signing up in thousands,” says Maher. “It gave us great courage. Then we moved into actions, because we thought, we’ve got all these signatories, what are we going to do with them?”

In 2016, the Irish government set up the Citizens’ Assembly, a body of randomly chosen members of the public, to discuss issues such as abortion and climate change; out of it came women’s stories about how the eighth amendment had impacted them. “That had a huge effect on people, and we saw that was how to reach people – with true stories,” says Maher.

When you reclaim imagery, you take the power back Alice Maher

The same year, the Artists’ Campaign created A Day of Testimonies, in which women’s stories were read at a theatre. “The arts at its best allows discussion, allows people to experience something, look at it, listen to it, consider it for their own selves,” says Brennan. “It opens places that haven’t been open for a long time. That was our experience about the debate about abortion – it had not been public. Art helped to bring it out in a different way.”

Pioneer … Mainie Jellett’s Abstract Composition, 1935. Photograph: courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery, Cork

EVA International will include recordings of 12 testimonies, as well as a film programme Brennan is putting together. (The 12-week arts programme also takes in big themes such as technology and national identity.) Their banners will be shown in an exhibition after the procession, and the campaign archive – letters, press cuttings – will also be on display. People can come along and shred pages with symbolic number eights. “It’s a live campaign, right there,” says Maher.

The banners were painted and embroidered by Maher and some of the other artists involved in the campaign, including Rachel Fallon, Áine Phillips and Breda Mayock. One is based on the painting David and Goliath by Orazio Gentileschi, kept in the National Gallery of Ireland, and shows a young woman slaying a dragon; another alludes to Piero della Francesca’s Renaissance image of the Madonna – the artists’ version has her dress covered with an eye motif.

“We’re very aware of the power of imagery,” says Maher. “When you reclaim imagery, you take the power back. We’re also aware of them being beautiful objects, and our intent was that they would be gathered in a national collection and nobody could say that we didn’t fight for our rights.”

I meet Fallon later. She is wearing an apron she has made, in linen and pink silk satin, with the motto: “To ensure hope is our role”. Six aprons will be part of the procession, decorated with military mottos that can be read when the apron is unfolded and pulled up to the chest.

It was important, she says, that the banners be positive. “I think visuals are really important to people and it does change how you see something. If it’s not aggressive, it leaves an opening to talk rather than presenting something as a dogmatic fact. As a counterbalance to these at times horrific photos the anti-choice side like to show, [we] try to create a visual culture that is more hopeful.”

Work by other Irish artists in EVA also speaks to the debate about reproductive rights. Take the images of Madonna and child by the Irish modernist painter Mainie Jellett, who worked in the 1920s and 30s. “Her work is fascinating,” says EVA’s curator Inti Guerrero, “not only because of modernism, but because you can see all the tensions and struggles that are linked to how to negotiate being modern and advanced and at the same time being highly Catholic and religious.”

We asked women what are the consequences? The responses that came back were really shocking

Activist, theatre director and writer Grace Dyas will be showing her 2017 performance work Not at Home. Made with Emma Fraser, it includes video footage of a journey from Ireland to a UK abortion clinic in Liverpool, and a performance of stories women submitted to the artists. “It’s about seeing that journey,” says Dyas. “We have all had friends or family members who have travelled or considered travelling. So many women in Ireland have had this experience, and we felt their voices weren’t being heard.”

Dyas says: “What [the country is] basically saying is, ‘Yes, you can have an abortion, but not at home.’ We wanted to ask women: what are the consequences? Some of the things that came back were really shocking.” One woman told them she had forgotten she wasn’t meant to eat or drink anything before the procedure, and had a cup of tea at the airport; she couldn’t come back for a termination another day and so went through it without anaesthetic. Another woman bled all over the bathmat at a B&B in Manchester. “The reality of people’s experiences transcends polemical debating language,” says Dyas. “Art can show the humanity and help people find the nuance in their own opinions.”

‘It’s a live campaign, right there’ … artists and supporters will process through Limerick at the start of the EVA International festival.

The mood among the artists I speak to is hopeful, but wary. “It’s a world movement,” says Fallon. “In the same way all eyes, especially in the rightwing Christian groups in America, are looking at how things will pan out here, I think we’ve also taken in a lot from women’s groups around the world. Nobody could have imagined #MeToo.”

Brennan and Maher have been fighting for change for 35 years. It does feel different now, they say. “The Catholic church has lost its power,” says Maher. “They really pulled a big one in 1983 from the altar. What has happened since then is a big change.” Nonetheless, Maher doesn’t underestimate the power of the other side, “or the power of leftover Catholicism in the deepest recesses of the psyche”.

Brennan adds: “Or the fear of women’s bodies”.

‘Institutionalised misogyny’ … Sanja Iveković’s pregnant monument, Lady Rosa of Luxembourg 2001, on display in Limerick. Photograph: Deirdre Power/Courtesy of the artist

Across the bridge, at a former condensed-milk factory, a monument by the Croatian artist Sanja Iveković is being constructed. Rendered in gilt, nine metres in the air, it dazzles against a constantly changing Limerick sky. It was first shown in Luxembourg in 2001, a replica of the city’s war memorial, but in Iveković’s version the figure is pregnant. The original inscriptions to the heroes of the first world war were changed to words including “whore, bitch, Madonna, virgin”. Changing the inscription “related to the violence that occurs within institutionalised misogyny,” says Guerrero. “It created this radical public statue.”

Several years on, in a different country, and within the context of the referendum, it now relates to “how pregnancy is heavily politicised ... the body of a pregnant woman belongs always to the larger society and not to the freedom of the individual. The work asks why is it that historically we disallow women to own their body and let the collective decide?”