evebnightingale@gmail.com www.behance.net/evenightingale
Kristeva, J (1982), Powers of Horror, Columbia University Press - pg. 4 Douglas, M (1966), Purity and Danger, Routledge - pg. 36
140 – 141
Gallery in Deptford Town Hall. Dust used to make the coat was collected by Tracy from the houses she cleans. This ‘performance’, as the culmination of this arrangement, aimed to make the invisible visible, bringing the overlooked into focus. As a platform on which to discuss, question and perhaps destabilise the disparate organisation of power in the client/cleaner relationship, the project hopes to expose the limits of solidarity between women so vividly divided by race and class. It’s still women’s work, but it is not every woman’s work.
Women’s Work
could be material and metaphor at the same time. With this, the domestic cleaner was identified as the key figure in the project: she who traversed between the material and the immaterial, unable to choose. Indeed, the domestic labour force acutely reflects the most powerful divides in modern society: gender, class, and race. Tracy, a local domestic cleaner, had mainly female clients. It seemed women too could be complicit in the gendered construction of housework. As such, the project suggests that the greater economic and political agency enjoyed by some women can be directly linked to the growing demand for domestic labour. The conclusion of the project manifested itself in the creation of a dust-felted coat, publicly constructed in the Constance Howard Textiles