About Us

PINK! is a collaborative group dedicated to the empowerment of women and mothers.

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.

*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.

“When people feel authentically seen and their stories heard, systems respond.” (Judah, 2022)

Rationale: SHUT IN/SHUT OUT

Critical problem: The exclusion of women and parents

Choice/lack of choice around having a family
External pressures on women internationally to marry and have children
A disconnect between what women want for themselves and what is expected of them
A loss of voice: A feeling of being unseen, unheard and undervalued

SHUT IN / SHUT OUT seeks to investigate the internal and external pressures women feel around having or not having children.

Often quite literally shut inside and therefore shut out of many engagements and opportunities, we want to explore the emotional landscape women navigate as they begin to make critical life decisions around starting a family.

With the majority of the world existing within a patriarchal power structure to a greater or lesser degree, these norms give women the role of domestic labourer, subordinate and exploited, uncompensated by capitalism, causing a wide range of socially necessary work to be devalued” (Elias Koudry, 2022).

This devaluing fuels a feeling of exclusion in mothers/parents/carers, with a virtual denial that domestic work exists, parenting being largely overlooked in favour of wealth creation. This creates a feeling of being unseen (Kaylan Buteyn, 2022).

Rights and imbalances vary dramatically depending on geographical location. We want to communicate the voices of women across continents, reflecting the international student body of our group and the wider community at the RCA.