Drawing from a vast library of recent online birth videos,

Helen Knowles appropriates imagery of women in the

transcendental state of birth. Sourced from films posted

on YouTube by women empowered by their experience,

Knowles’ striking prints attempt to unpick cultural attitudes

to birth and probe the difficulty audiences may have with

certain kinds of imagery. YouTube portraits consist of seven

large-scale screen prints. Using an innovative printing

technique of exposing a screen with a digital projector,

Knowles creates images that oscillate between the figurative

and abstraction. By selecting footage that portrays the

women’s euphoria, Knowles attempts to capture the intense

emotion through a heightened colour contrast, challenging

the separation between women as mothers and women

as sexual entities.