Domestic Matters

Abstract

“Domestic matters” consisted of eight works presented on two group exhibitions. The works searched for expression of the often-conflictual context through which familial relationships are articulated.

The shaped-format painting "Carry me softly" initiated the 2023 creative output research to investigate how everyday things trigger a reflection of the past. Acknowledging my previous mycelium research, small mushrooms grow from the carpet and under the table in this artwork as signs of degeneration. Reflecting on the comfort of objects belonging together being inadvertently separated through life circumstances (much like people in a household), a weathered table rises from a fluffy carpet suggesting an act of separation.

Two photographic works, “The mother” and “The father”, are the outcome of a process involving the use of a discarded scrubbing brush. This process recalls a memory of my mother polishing red cement floors. Considering the interaction between the worn object and the gleaming polished floor, I captured the brush from various angles: looking down onto it, confronting the cracked brush head-on and documenting the same object laterally, suggesting that access is barred. These changing perspectives was my attempt to ‘think through’ the distress of the paradoxical emotions of shame, love, fear and exclusion. In these photographic works, the act of close looking was also a contemplation of gender roles experienced in my childhood. My mother’s debilitating and damaged life, alongside my father’s own fragility emersed in poverty and dyslexia, are narratives I’ve been rewriting through my life. In “Violence, Gender, and Subjectivity”, Veena Das (2008:283-299), reminds us that there are deep connections between our experiences of the everyday and understanding of emotional wounding. The cracks on my ‘rescued’ brush had debris embedded in its worn surface and reminded of the psychological scars caused by precarious relationships, a theme associated with artworks by, amongst others, Usha Seejarim and Louise Bourgeois. “The Mother” and “The Father” are contributions to the visual discourse of encoded gender constructs.

An enlarged process-print of “The father”, opened the suggestion of a wooden boat-shaped structure. The mixed media works “The Pont I” and “Pont II”, along with “Farmhouse”, seek to draw links to environments that refers to specific childhood daydreaming of water and a wooden raft that will carry me away.

“History /Herstory lessons in brushwork” and “Ode to all mothers” were created by scrubbing the paper using the discarded brush, thus allowing the object to physically ‘perform’ my memory in the artmaking process. The process-driven and object-bound way of drawing-through-scrubbing becomes a unique gestation of a trope of domesticity and women's work. “History /Herstory lessons in brushwork” started by rubbing charcoal dust into brown craft paper until the brush found its way onto the page. In “Ode to all mothers", I poured a puddle of ink and water onto curved Fabriano, then gently scrubbed it into the surface, allowing it to dry overnight. The drying process added its own movement, resulting in only traces of my actions with the brush – an inky patch reminiscent of a surreal landscape.

On researching the idea of past experiences’ impact on an unfolding present, I found the terminology of "recasting and pastcasting" in the article "Looking backward to the future: On past-facing approaches to futuring", where Bendor, Eriksson and Pargman (2021) postulate that memory is more malleable than what we imagine. Instead of being bound by the past that is fixed in childhood, new ways of thinking can shift debilitating remembering. Though physically reenacting thought, my narrative moved to a measure of personal agency. These ideas are evoked in the collaged image of urchin-like brushes floating over the surreal landscape of “Ode to all mothers", where the detached object becomes a symbol that is both past-facing and future-facing.

The contribution of this project lay in the reinventive power of art, and how its processes and materials can actively help to reexperience interpretations of contradiction, to build agency in a project of recasting the past as an approach to “futuring” (Bendor et al. 2021). "Carry me softly" was first exhibited at “Rhizome” (Latuvu Art Gallery, France, July 2023) and then again with the new artworks in the exhibition “Object” (George Museum, October 2023). Both exhibitions were curated by Elfriede Dreyer.