With key interests around feminism, invisible figures and single parenting, we came together with a collective interest in why women* make the choices they make around having or not having children.
Through facilitating the sharing of stories, we enable individual voices to be heard, in the hope of easing the feelings of isolation and loneliness that can be associated with being a parent/primary carer.
We also seek to highlight the pressure women* can feel around parenthood choices as a direct result of possessing the female body and its designed functions.
Our explorative process involved sourcing 25 participants willing to contribute their thoughts and feelings around being/becoming a parent. Structured around 5 key questions, we have anonymously published the responses of the 25 participants who responded. The selection of answers on SHUT IN / SHUT OUT is limited to the responses we got, and is not a true representation of the diverse identities that women can be or even the diversity of those we reached out to.
We believe the potentiality of development to grow this project is there, starting by create a room for audience making conversation and telling stories (user-generated) inside the website itself. Then drive the audience to another platform of social media where then can be home for them to arrange advanced activities offline and online being a support group for each other.
*for the purposes of this research art project the category of 'woman' includes cis-women, trans-women, and queer women, in short anyone who identifies as a woman.
