Statement

The pandemic has not so much created, but revealed gendered suffering and socioeconomic inequalities, highlighting the precarity and fragility of ground gained by previous generations of women. I seek to address questions raised by the emerging political land-scape with a reassessment of the home as a site of resistance.

Working in my home during the pandemic, I have used performance, film, social media platforms, drawing, collecting, documenting and mediation. I have examined the blurring of sites, behaviours and labour associated with home and work and the impact of lock-down which has made us question and rethink the domestic space.

Through a self-organised collective of women called The Moaners who were made redundant by the pandemic, I have mediated and chronicled women’s increased unpaid domestic labour and the shift to ‘working from home’ as ‘never leaving work’ throughout the home confinement. The importance of duration in my performance has been essential as a way to portray time spent on domestic labour during lockdown.

As mediator for this group, my practice touched on relationships between the physical and the virtual, and therefore it is entirely in keeping that recently I have moved into a category of practice where I host online and offline events to bring people together, generating discussion in areas such as women’s labour.

Groups of people who have little or no representation constitute an audience for my work. This creates a specific audience in this extraordinary time, where the audience was always presumed to be linked to the setting, which is no longer the case. Digitisation has changed the people I could reach, marginalised women who would have been excluded by virtue of being stuck at home, but who could now log on with their smart phones and engage with the project. I hope to open up possible channels of communication and new forms of community.

One of the questions I address in my work is whether the current situation will be one that is socially productive or destructive? Researching the Lucas Plan and Wages for Housework has prompted a critique of the unproductive through challenging the current unprecedented state control and coercion. I addressed this through a live-streamed performance, responding to anonymous commands from viewers by the use of a camera facing into my home highlighting the reconfiguration of public/private spaces and the physical separation with a move online during this time.

Moving my work outside the traditional settings associated with the art world has been revelatory. It operates as a reparative

to the devaluation of care; and reinforces fragile community networks that provide support to working mothers. These investigations have come together in my most recent work which will include The Moaners online lunch in June, with guest speaker Bobby Baker who will describe how her kitchen became an exhibition site, revealing hidden domestic labour. The Moaners will voice their pandemic experience, making it visible, whilst being filmed doing so, homing in on this specific group of people to foreground commonality of experience and reveal formerly hidden lives.