Jennifer Trouton RUA

Jennifer Trouton
Six Months Gone
155x122cm
Oil on linen

Six Months Gone is part of a body of practice I have been developing since 2016, created in collaboration with Dr. Mark Benson. Benson's doctoral research at Queen's University, completed in 2017, examined the history of abortion provision in Northern Ireland between 1900 and 1968. His work highlighted the consequences of the UK's 1967 Abortion Act, which legalized abortion in England, Scotland, and Wales but was never extended to Northern Ireland. As a result, women here continued to face extremely limited access to abortion until its eventual decriminalisation in 2019.

Against this historical backdrop, my work considers the women whose lives were shaped by the social, political, and religious forces that sought to suppress reproductive autonomy in Ireland.It highlights how, regardless of continued attempts to reduce their influence and autonomy, women continued to find ways to exert agency over their own bodies. 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.
During my research, I encountered an abortifacient recipe recorded by the 11th-century Italian gynaecologist Trota of Salerno, widely regarded as the first female professor at the renowned medical school of Salerno. Her writings remain among the most significant medieval sources on women's medicine.
Drawing upon the complete list of ingredients she prescribed, I developed a wallpaper design that reinterprets William Morris's Lily pattern. In weaving these hidden symbols of reproductive knowledge into a decorative surface, the pattern shifts from being a passive embellishment to an act of creative resistance. This motif reappears throughout the broader project in wallpapers, fabrics, and paintings, and is central to Six Months Gone.
In Six months Gone I combine William Morris's Fruit wallpaper with Trota's recipe pattern featured within a draped silk fabric. In the Foreground a wilted peony and a bleeding pomegranate lying portentously in the foreground invoking the myth of Persephone. According to Greek mythology, Persephone was abducted by Hades while gathering flowers and taken to the underworld. In her absence, her mother Demeter, goddess of agriculture, grieved so deeply that nothing grew. Unaware of the consequences, Persephone ate six of the twelve pomegranate seeds offered to her in the underworld. As punishment, Zeus decreed she must spend six months each year below with Hades and six months above with her mother. Her descent and return became a mythic explanation for the cycles of fertility and barrenness, the changing of the seasons.
At the centre of the work lies the pomegranate, a fruit steeped in symbolism across cultures. Believed by many traditions to be the true fruit of Eden rather than the apple, it continues to appear in rituals and ceremonies today. Its meaning is often bound to fertility, yet it carries a dual identity, standing equally for birth and for death.
The wallpaper backdrop extends this theme of duality, incorporating botanicals from my series of watercolours titled Mater Natura: The Abortionist's Garden, that catalogues plants historically associated with reproductive control. Many of these plants, such as sage and chamomile, occupy an ambivalent position in the history of medicine. Taken with care, they can nurture pregnancy and safeguard health, yet in different contexts they have long been used to induce miscarriage or abortion. They are at once protective and dangerous, nurturing and destructive. This duality underscores the fragility and complexity of women's relationships with nature, medicine, and control over their own bodies.