In Plain Sight is an exhibition that started in the historical archives. It began as a series of stories hidden in medical records, coroners’ reports, witness statements, jury verdicts, newspaper clippings and incriminating letters from lovers and abortion providers. The pregnant women involved were single, married, widowed and separated, aged from their teens up to their forties. They were mothers already or had no children. They were city women and country women, they were domestic servants, typists, nurses, factory workers and schoolgirls. Some were wooed and romanced, cared for and proposed to. Some were ignored and dumped at bus stops, abused on country lanes and raped by their employers. The forgotten women from the archives were as many and as varied as the unknown women who live today. Each woman was an individual, but all were united by a common trait; they were pregnant, and they did not want that pregnancy to result in a birth.
In Plain Sight is an exhibition featuring large-scale and intimately sized works which balance themes that are historical, social and personal. Trouton plays with the still-life genre in compositions that are simultaneously traditional and darkly subversive. Her colour palette evokes a calm sense of nostalgia that draws in her viewers, before asking them to consider Ireland’s uncomfortable relationship with women’s reproductive rights, one that is still evolving and is forever subject to the political and ideological mores of others
The exhibition considers the women impacted by societal and religious attempts to suppress reproductive rights in Ireland. It highlights how, regardless of continued attempts to reduce the influence and autonomy of women, women still accessed the tools necessary to control their own destinies. In many cases, they found the objects of their own emancipation in the domestic spaces that were assigned to them. They found them in plain sight.
Artist bio
Jennifer Trouton is a Belfast based artist whose practice incorporates paint, embroidery, wallpaper, textiles and artefacts. Formally her work appropriates the tropes of traditional still life painting, a genre that was traditionally associated with female artists due to their sex barring them from acquiring the necessary anatomical knowledge to paint ‘high genre’ works of portraiture, history or religion. Through her charting of spaces, objects and experiences Trouton creates contemporary coded dramas that subtly express ideas around gender, class and identity within Irish history. Her still life’s combines an interest in the mythological and historical with the personal stories and meta-narratives of women.
Images: Jennifer Trouton, In Plain Sight, RHA Gallery, Sept ’24, Installation Photography Ros Kavanagh.
Jennifer Trouton, Bring Down the Flowers II, 2023, Oil on board, 40cm diameter, Image courtesy of the artist.
Jennifer Trouton, Original Sin (detail), 2023, Oil on linen, Photo Simon Mills, Image courtesy of the artist.
www.jennifertrouton.com #InPlainSight
