Political Slogans and Flower Magick: If you cut off my reproductive choice, can I cut off yours?

This work is from the Magical Politics series which focused on feminist activists in the US who employed non-violent strategies during the 1980s. Bowers plays up the centrality of visual strategies to non-violent protest through the craft-like nature of her piece. Bowers’s work is immediately appealing, almost decorative, in a way that disarms the viewer. On closer inspection, though, we see that individual flowers are embedded with found objects—political buttons. While certainly a work on paper, Political Slogans and Flower Magick is a dimensional drawing. Cut, folded and shaped with consummate skill, it gestures to the politicised role that handicrafts have played throughout time, but most specifically in relation to the feminist movements that are Bowers’s primary concern. This work was presented by the Art Fund through Art Fund International.