Home-Maker: Reflections on a Domestic Practice

Before entering this paper on Art and Domestic Labour, it is worth disclosing that I am (or have been until recently) a military wife. There are definite connotations associated with military wives. Although I never considered myself typical, I realise on reflection that my enquiries into domesticity are intrinsically linked to this experience.

The role of military wife has not only affected the way I work and my capacity to work, but has undoubtedly biased, perhaps skewed, how I relate to home and to my role as a wife and mother. Regular moves, and the consequential career impact for military spouses (still predominantly women), means that the home and the running of it becomes central to their role, creating a conservation of gendered roles greater here than in civilian society. Underlying regimental expectations extend to the role of wife and to the domestic space: duty, devotion and conduct; order, function, and cleanliness. All in opposition to my creative sensibilities.

I recognise that as a military spouse, this tussle between artist and homemaker has perhaps been all the more intense. Attempting a double life as Artist and Army Wife has proved entertaining, comedic even.

My route into making work around domesticity was born out of this dynamic, and out of a need to find a way to laugh at what felt like a ridiculous predicament.

This paper unpicks Home-Maker, a series of works that set in motion my practice's trajectory into the domestic. I consider how these works frame the home, and its attendant activities, as a valuable site of, and significant contributors to, cultural production. I reflect on my role as a 'domestic practitioner', and on how this intentional self-titling, and these artworks, contribute to the critical discourse around the roles and social obligations of women, of 'woman's work', and the wider feminist agenda.

In 2018, shortly after becoming a mum, and finding myself even more tied to the house, it became apparent that domesticity was winning the battle for my time. Struggling to find an Art/Life balance, I decided to embrace my domestic roles and observe them for art-making purposes.

From these observations came a body of work entitled Home-Maker. This title arose from a disquieting conversation with a family member who thought it complimentary to suggest I'd found my calling in this role. Having grappled for many years with the ghost of this conversation, I leapt at the chance to reimagine and reframe this term in a way that served my own purposes.

On Sunday 2nd December 2018, I opened up my home to the public and exhibited works amongst the chaos and debris of family life. Home-Maker took the viewer on a narrative journey of the home, through performance, installation and intervention: works which sought to situate the artist in relation to mother, wife and homemaker.

Exhibiting domestic works within the home setting appears well reasoned. And although I'd like to believe this had some part to play in the decision, it would be remiss not to acknowledge an alternate motivation based in the perverse and knowingly-petty. I felt removed from, and insignificant to, the art world. The invisibility I felt as an artist mirrored the cultural invisibility of the domestic. The futility of choosing to situate this work at home, where the footfall would be limited, appealed to my sense of irony. Equally, the idea of showing work in my own home, the antithesis of a slick gallery space, just made me laugh.

The home, therefore, became more than just the container for these works: staging this exhibition became a performance in itself.

In appropriating the contextual language of the traditional white cube, visitors were called on to buy into the charade of the gallery space. Gallery invigilators ushered viewers with hushed voices, and once inside, visitors were met with all the expected props: floor plans, exhibition text, interpretive labels. There was even a gallery shop.

Matching and applying these institutional signifiers to the home setting suggested a value not commonly imagined: presenting the home as equal to a gallery space challenges notions of high art and low culture. It questions the split between the value we attribute to the public and domestic spheres, and the gendering of space, from the masculine gallery to the domestic, which has historically been essentialised as feminine. In applying this alternate lens to the home, we are reminded of its implicit function of display, prompted to give credence to the objects we choose to present, and invited to reimagine the home as a site of cultural value.

Choosing to exhibit Home-Maker within the home influenced and shaped the work produced within this series. The home, rather than just acting as a container, became an active agent, complicit and integral to the development and making of this work.

Much like yesterday was conceived as a score of actions performed within the home. Whilst the title sought to emphasise the tedium of domestic labour, the choice to perform these actions over eight hours spoke to the approximate length of the domestic day.

Wordplay is a common feature within my practice. I am drawn to the ambiguity of words and the sculptural potential to exploit and interpret meanings. The opportunity to simultaneously conjure the dutiful wife whilst reimagining these tasks was a provocation I could not ignore.

I invited viewers to observe me in the usually unseen act of housewifery: I performed my domestic duties.

Compiling and presenting these domestic actions in such a way as to suggest choice created a counter-narrative, toying with people's perceptions of both the actions and of my role. Choosing to elevate domestic labour to a performance was an act of self-determination. I attested to my role as artist: Housework is Artwork.

'Broccoli Tots (July to October), 2018' is a series of kitchen prints chronicling the repeat meal-making over four months.

I consider these kitchen prints as documentation of a durational performance. I combined ingredients to make my son's meal, baked them, served them, and then instead of discarding the used greaseproof paper, I signed each one, as one might an artist's proof, and framed them: producing a collection of Broccoli Tot prints over a period of a few months.

Observing the amount of unacknowledged time spent engaged in these activities, and the frustration of this hard work being so rapidly undone, I wanted to make this work more tangible, to preserve it so the labour didn't go unnoticed.

Through titling, preservation and display of these artefacts, I look to make these past events tangible, asking the viewer to mentally reconstruct the scenarios and actions which led to these traces: figuratively and physically framing the evidence of domestic labour and the repetition required within mothering.

When deciding to make these Home-Maker works and present them in my own home, I'd leapt at the absurdity of the idea. However, as the exhibition date neared, I had the dawning realisation that people would actually be in my home. I became acutely and uncomfortably aware of its shortfalls. It still looked, and possibly smelt, like the previous retiree occupants lived there, there were numerous half-finished DIY jobs on the go, I had a small person who created chaos wherever he went. In sum, it failed to live up to my idealised version of home: as a destination, it was far from Instagram-able.

From this discomfort was born Domestic Confessions, a series of conversational and sometimes confessional exhibit labels narrating a journey through the domestic sphere and revealing snippets of family life.

Just as a stand-up comic might make self-deprecating jokes, this work offered up the perceived personal lacking as a pre-emptive manoeuvre. The self-aware commentaries tap into the universal anxieties around houseproud-ness. In borrowing the authoritative language of gallery text to voice my internal thoughts about the mundane objects and spaces of my home, these labels undermine the expectations of what exhibit text ought to be or do, and draw attention to the worth of these small domestic anecdotes.

The original intention of the Home-Maker photographic series was to document the unseen acts of domestic labour: in drawing public attention to these everyday actions, in bringing them into the public arena, by making them culturally perceptible, they might gain worth.

They hint at a secret life of the housewife.

Since making this work I have begun to use the term Domestic Practitioner to describe my practice.

I use this term with intention: its ambiguous nature reflects the calling of women to be and do many things, it infers all the roles of Artist, Mother, and Wife, and because, at least at the moment, it feels impossible to delineate between where one role begins and another ends. I use this term to acknowledge the blurring and intentional merging between home life and art practice, and as a way to embrace the equal value of all my competing roles.

In choosing to describe myself in this way, I am claiming this space and role as valuable and significant.

However, there is a discomfort in using this term and by extension the practice it describes: through association with a place that has traditionally inferiorised women, and through making practice around a topic that holds no stature within culture, I imperil my identity as a serious artist. Equally, making work about the domestic, based in the home, as a woman, I risk reinforcing the very categorisations and myths about the division of labour that I seek to undermine.

But, inescapable connotations aside, it still feels imperative to both make this work and to use this self-determined descriptor.

Despite the near-universal experience of the home and lengthy periods spent engaged in domestic labour, this subject matter seems conspicuously under-documented within art making and uncelebrated within the wider art canon. One could argue that it is because of the familiarity, the regularity, the automatic and routine nature of domestic labour, that it has failed to make its mark as a subject of interest. And yet generations of women artists have made work about their domestic experiences.

The answer points to the status and value of the home and its attendant activities, which have historically been assigned as feminine and, as such, of lesser value. The art world, being a reflection of broader societal values, does not value the domestic experience. This subject matter is sidestepped for fear of being invalidated, or if acted upon, the subsequent works are ghettoised within feminist practice. Consequently, artwork about domestic labour remains peripheral at best.

As my practice has developed, my concern has extended beyond domesticity's imperceptibility within the art canon. More, that this underrepresentation belies the (still) inferior status of women: because the feminine and the domestic are so intrinsically linked in the collective unconscious, it is only once these domestic acts are valued in society that perceptions of women will change.

Scarry reminds us that the domestic is not peripheral to civilisation, but foundational to it.

"The unmaking of civilisation inevitably requires a return to and mutilation of the domestic, the ground of all making."