One of the topics my work explores is the tensions that exist within societies
and with the religions in those societies that pressure women into bearing children, and the
insensitivities that arise from this pressure. I particularly explore the medical side effects of
hormone treatments, issues of biological clocks ticking and limited egg reserves. Of particular
interest to me are the ethical and moral issues that accompany sperm and egg donors:
especially issues of greed and overuse of sperm and eggs.
My mother was not a feminist, yet growing up in 1970s suburban north London I was witness to, and complicit in, her active refusal to conform to the expectations of a good housewife. Cleaning, tidying, dusting, washing up, were all low on the list of my mother’s priorities, instead she played tennis, she grew vegetables, she went out dancing; my sister and I were left to our own devices. As a feminist artist, I have adopted my mother’s domestic dissent, integrating it as philosophy into the processes and outcomes of my art making practice. I do not have a studio but make art in my kitchen; I rarely clean or tidy up, I utilize my domestic space and the objects that inhabit it, as a temporalized site of domestic resistance.
The domestic objects and household ornaments of our childhoods take on an emotional value that shape our notions of self; that construct significant personal identities. In the body of work " "Transcendental Housework", I subvert these domestic objects that haunt our retrogressive imagination. This is dysfunctional furniture and ambivalent ornamentation. Sculptural objects, both floor based and wall based seem to lurk or loiter in the gallery space, they have a whiff of discontented anthropomorphism.