Fallen By The Wayside
Abortion and contraception are by no means modern interventions. For millennia, women have utilised a variety of plants to control and regulate their fertility. To this day, our hedgerows and waysides are still rich with these plants that were once used as emmenagogues and abortifacients, that allowed women to have bodily autonomy.
By unveiling lost narratives, and visualising the rituals of the sexual and reproductive female body, ancient knowledge that was stripped from women, in the face of modern medicine, is revealed. This investigation seeks to awaken us from our latent and patriarchal origins that deemed these skills of caring, healing, and maintaining women’s bodies, a threat to those in power.
Within this interchange between the natural elements, cyclical traces between women, celestial bodies, and the land emerge. Through the use of the powerful flora, alongside the light of the moon to quite literally shed light on our histories. Tying us not only to one another but also to non-human beings we find within nature. Revealing how intrinsically interconnected humans are within the natural processes of the land and the stratosphere beyond.
These images are made through a camera-less, moon-based technique that Alice developed and called lunargrams. Made by placing light-sensitive paper directly into the hedgerows and waysides, or placing the collected plants onto the paper, and exposing them to the light of the full moon.
laying in a bed of bishops lace and artemisia,
thin white traces of paper flowers
by the wayside, a pharmacopeia of the past
soaked silver by the moon,
thriving on the margins, wild and
elysian
lunar lunacy lunatic,
a celestial body
blood moon,
cyclical and predictable
aligning only to be disassem
bled
pennyroyal, tansy, rue
fertilised for you
plucked from the edges
an emmenagogic bouquet
a ritual and
burial
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beneath the paper pallid light
a skin, sickle and sickly
nauseated and sticky
brew and drink it up,
serrated cups
quickening
a lost knowledge, stripped
from women of the past
veiled by time (men)
too much of a threat
forced to
forget
as I stand on the edges,
bathed in milk light,
I follow the cyclical traces,
a herbal autonomy
to reclaim our
past
