This work is a response to Priti Patel’s “Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 condemned by all concerned with civil liberties- Liberty’s brief about how this Act reduces your freedom to protest here:
Women have always been at the forefront of resistance- have always protested, whoever, everywhere, seen and unseen.
Using my personal archive, police at demonstrations create a “frame”. Discarded photographs found in charity shops (plus one of my mother) are centred in each “frame” of oppression- women through the ages. Here as actors, yet perhaps they were resisters, dissidents?
In my practice I consider my impact on the environment, so no new materials were used, except ink, printing on available recycled non-photographic paper. They are not archival- the images will fade but the spirit will always be.
(I have to acknowledge that the PCSC Act was drafted by Priti Patel; that Metropolitan Police officers violently arrested women attending a vigil of a victim killed by a police officer, under the watch of Commissioner Cressida Dick. This is a whole other layer of complexity of female leaders functioning within a patriarchal, hierarchical system, and for another project another day.)
