This series explores the psycho-social and socio-political landscape of domestic bliss using hand-cut strips of Viva paper towel. It encapsulates my ongoing dialogue with the groove-lines imprinted in Viva paper towel. Paper towels that have a pattern are more absorbent than ones that don’t, because the ridges and grooves of the design pull water into them. These grooves are purposefully imprinted into the material to make them more useful in systems of cleaning and care. These constructed ‘grooves’ remind the artist of the ways feminised forms of labour are treated as inherent traits that women and other feminised and racialised bodies are apparently more intrinsically capable, or desirous, of doing.
Domestic Topography (sample I)
Materials: thinly cut groove-line strips of used, rescued (and sanitised) Viva paper towel, embroidery thread, stabiliser.
Medium: paper textile weave
The artist’s kitchen ‘spills’ over a four-month period are delicately woven into this abstract arrangement of crossing lines. Domesticity is rarely blissful; there is often terrible darkness, bursts of brilliant light, and all the murky browns in between.
Domestic Topography (sample II)
Domestic Topography (sample III)
Domestic Topography (Terror)
Materials: Thinly cut groove-line strips of used, rescued, sanitised, and re-stained Viva paper towels, stabiliser, and stained embroidery thread. Medium: Paper textile weave mounted on plywood.
The aesthetic gesture in this work is one of painstaking constraint, precision, and balance. Through meticulous exploration of the structural limits and aesthetic possibilities of this fragile and unstable everyday material, the work offers us a poignant examination of life’s expectation of resilience amidst its inherent vulnerabilities and uncertainties.