FINE ART
Alongside my work as a designer, I have developed a practice as an artist who considers her home as a studio. It’s a place where my domestic life feeds directly into my creative work and I live, think and work with this simultaneity in all its contradictions.
My work considers identity politics within the context of everyday family life and the space we call ‘home’. It examines how society attributes value to the role of care – feeding, nursing, cleaning, organising, homemaking – all activities which exist outside of the traditional monetary measure of GDP.
The varied and often unexpected artistic responses reinvigorate the cyclical rituals of care and provoke a re-evaluation of where and by what means we attribute worth and value.
DOMESTIC RESIDENCY
Domestic Residency took place at home over the period of a year. Made at a point in my life in which I had 4 small children and struggled to apply or take part in traditional ‘artists residencies’, I decided to set one up at home. My practice evolved to address the home as a cultural concept using my work as an exploration of my identity as the principal carer within the family. I responded to my household chores daily as an artist, subverting the restrictions perceived in such tasks and enabling an intense focus on the living process. The mess and detritus produced by the cyclical rituals of home management are harnessed, manipulated and in doing so our perception of their value shifts.
Below is some of the documentation from the residency.
ROOM
Room is part of a wider body of work exploring the way in which domestic spaces and furniture define intimate relationships particularly within a family unit. It consists of dramatic play texts presented alongside significant household objects represented in both full and miniature size. These artefacts, removed from home, remain imprinted with familial associations extending beyond the provision of physical comfort or function. The complex convoluted interplay that results between the layering of text and object echoes the complex narratives inherent in family relations and the spaces we inhabit.
GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT
Parlour Showrooms Bristol
Gross Domestic Product is a 3-day live baking incident, a cyclical domestic ritual performed in a gallery space. Chocolate cake is repeatedly and ceremoniously baked, iced and shared with the passing public. This routine gives rise to the unexpected, a questioning of the economic integers by which our society is governed. Who decides what kinds of products have value?
DAS HEIMAT | HOME
A journey to Switzerland to collaborate with designer Isabel Vogel to make a piece about the fluid boundaries between the interior and exterior spaces we associate with home. A vast replica of the exterior mountain view is sculpted in paper and ink inside the traditional Swiss house. A reciprocal visit to the Welsh hills is planned for the future.
