Visible labour, 2023, timelapse video 0:19.
Visible Labour makes the unseen, seen.
In this exploration, I carried an audiotape (Dolly Parton’s (9 to 5)) with me as I vacuumed and mopped on Sunday afternoon in winter (stopping in the kitchen to put dinner in the oven).
I recently read "Wifedom" Anna Funder's book about the life of Eileen Blair, Eric Blair's (aka George Orwell's) wife. It explicitly reimagines Orwell's biography to include and centre the labour and experiences of Eileen, especially in the way that she facilitated Orwell's work providing domestic, professional, emotional, and intellectual labour (eg. the format for Animal Farm was her idea, and 1984 came from a poem she wrote and her work in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in London during WWII). I've used audio tape in previous works due to its conceptual links to histories and returned to it again in this work.
The work also responds to concerns I have about the selfishness of the artistic life. Certainly the selfishness required to study art at this stage of my life, with three young children. And of course, the writer Cyril Connolly’s quote still cuts: “There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” (Except perhaps when you make it your art.)