My practice revolves around exploring structural exploitations of the female body through the lens of domesticity as a complex economic and political institution. While many avenues exist for observing this paradigm, I am particularly interested in the physicality of domestic labor, an aspect conceptualized both as a system fundamental to humanity’s perseverance and as a process designed to isolate women within the private sphere.

 

I explore these ideas through a material practice invested in the relationship between fiber and common industrial materials such as wood, concrete, and metal. Not only has fiber historically been categorized as “women’s work” but its formally repetitive means of fabrication has been closely associated with the alienation produced by the performance of tedious household tasks. Furthermore, fiber is often assumed to be an amorphous medium—seen as soft, fragile, and easily manipulated. Interrogating these assumptions lies at the core of my material practice, compelling me to explore the boundaries of fiber’s overlooked, yet significant, structural potential. ​

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As such, I investigate how, through alternative fabrication methodologies, fiber and industrial materials can visually and performatively assume each other’s identities. About a year ago, I began developing a process that allows me to weave low-density, three-dimensional structures that retain their own forms despite being made entirely out of yarn. Conversely, I engage materials such as steel grinding dust and concrete rubble to display structural mediums in precarious states, reframing materials traditionally associated with strength and self-sufficiency by underscoring their potential for softness and failure. By using systematized production processes designed to mimic the mechanics of domestic labor, my work physically and metaphorically subverts the assumed capacity of the female body and the gravity of women’s labor. Combined with my approach to material fabrication, such processes exist as performance aimed at producing objects that negotiate the alienation, invisibility, and impossibility of domestic labor.

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My body of work, Material Failures, culminates in my final thesis presentation, Fiber House. Constructed utilizing manually built looms and needles, the seven foot tall hand-woven structure took well over 200 hours to create, testing the limits of my physical and mental fortitude. Thus, the project was as much an object as it was an endurance performance executed privately in solidarity with the alienating redundancies of domestic labor.

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The grid, which repeats throughout the installation, is both fundamental to the structure of weaving and symbolic of the interconnectedness of every object, body, and idea relevant to human civilization. As such, the production of gridded forms through intensive manual labor elicits the necessity and privation of domestic work. Furthermore, the structure’s low-density gridded walls penetrate the boundaries of the public and private spheres. The sculpture transpose the grid onto everything in its vicinity, projecting its shadows onto the viewer’s skin; however, it also exposes the body contained within the house, thus mediating the precarity of the domestic space and the fraudulence of its protective character.

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Fiber House’ s arbitration of themes relevant to the sexual division of labor and the devaluation of the female body is further negotiated through my use of concrete. Unlike in many of my other pieces, which utilize concrete rubble, as to frame the material in a physically precarious state, Fiber House’ s floor is lined with cast concrete pavers. Some of the tiles are filled with rain water, emulating a sidewalk after it rains. Going one step further, I replicated the scent of rain on pavement in the gallery by diffusing the organic compound geosmin, responsible for producing the visceral aroma. As such, I reframe a typically cold and impersonal material as one capable of evoking nostalgia and tenderness, further complicating the delineation of the private and public spheres, while deconstructing the means through which the material world is falsely exploited in pursuit of patriarchal power and control.