Series 'Down Tools' (2025) by the artist Shona Macnaughton Photographer: Katherine Cox @kath_click
Look! She has her eyes wide open
Shona Macnaughton
Wed 15 April | T4
7.15pm - 7.45pm | Doors: 7pm
Duration: 30 mins
Access Key: BSL, AP
Look! She has her eyes wide open is a performance about life choices made in the name of art. It both commemorates and celebrates the 18th birthday of a decision made in order to be an artist. Mixing metaphors of birthing, aborting, and creativity, the performer uses slapstick and rhythmic phrasing to embroil the audience into their own collective decision.
Based on a documentary film about a French feminist organisation and their efforts to collectivise both birth and abortion, titled after a rough translation of the French ‘Regarde, elle a les yeux grand ouverts’ (1980), the performance approaches these issues from their real lived complex scale of ambivalence to trauma, with humour and tragedy. The imagined ‘baby person’ is both the performer, the audience and the life work that has led to the performance itself, and at the behest of a countdown we are asked - should it continue?
In 1979 National Abortion Campaign ‘Caravan Tour’ This tour originally did not find a venue in Glasgow (the only city missed from Scotland) possibly due to its stricter, less progressive city council regarding abortion laws at that time. The venues were mostly in and around universities and art schools. More than 40 years later with the focus of anti-abortion groups in the city necessitating the recent introduction of exclusion zones around hospitals, the performance rewrites this history, bringing the van finally to Glasgow, in a public intervention outside the performance venue.
When the right to abortion is again on shaky ground, the performance and installation navigates the complicated position of full spectrum solidarity across reproductive rights, encompassing birth, miscarriage, and abortion.
Credits:
Devised and performed by Shona Macnaughton
Content Notes:
Content notes: strong language, nakedness, audience interaction involving some physical touch (optional), references to abortion and fertility, allusions to sexual content, and physical depiction of gynaecological and breast exam (humorous)
This performance involves voluntary audience interaction. If you do not want to participate please contact Kai Khidir Hassan via email.
Shona Macnaughton is a performance artist, she makes live events based on artefacts from alternative political life from the past. Performing as a monstered version of herself Shona Service she drags these histories into the present, re-voicing them through contemporary movement and tone gleaned from social media observations. She spots fundamentals of character – both in individual subjects and in wider social bodies and isolates and exaggerates these aspects, not only for comic effect, but to highlight the environmental mechanisms that create these effects. Shona’s practice centres around pushing the everyday banalities of contemporary neoliberal logic into something, not only absurd, but often bordering on the pathological. Her performances can, at times, be excruciating to watch. And they are always carried out with the straightest of straight faces.
Shona has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries, museums, theatres, gig venues, clubs, dives, virtually and on the street. Recent projects include ‘The Participatory Clinic’ (2025) Glasgow Women’s Library, ‘Creative Discharge’ (2024) AVU festival, Prague and ‘Here To Deliver’ (2020), performed internationally, commissioned by Edinburgh University’s Contemporary Art Collection.