Helen Knowles portraits of women laboring

Description:
YouTube Portraits
A suite of seven large-scale screen prints. Each work depicts a still image, taken from a vast library of home-birth videos posted internationally by women on the internet. The images are screen-grab close-ups of women’s faces exhaling and reclining at the moment the baby crowns, as well as wider views of this moment revealing the women’s euphoria in their domestic spaces. The works featured in YouTube Series appropriate and re-present these women’s filmed experiences and connect to a wider international concern with social media as a tool to democratise what can often be tightly controlled and censored experiences. I have created each print by using a pioneering method of exposing the screen with a digital projector. A technique I devised, which relies on an analogue understanding of the photographic process but results in a pixelated image which directly references the technological origin of the source material.