Ablution

Site specific installation at 33 Officinia Creativa, in a converted 13th Century Benedictine church

June 2018, Toffia, Italy

Silk cyanotype prints, string, clothespins, dried flowers

This work is both installation and performance. It came out of a desire to better know the women who came before me: my grandmothers and great grandmothers. I remember them vividly, but I want to know them not as doting grandparents, but as young women. Who were they beyond motherhood? I cannot ask them, and so I ask my mother, my grandfather, I learn through their memories, through old photographs, and through my imaginings. I’m connected to these women in my body, and so I set out to access this.

The women in my family do laundry. My mother does laundry nearly every day. While she and my father split the household duties evenly, the laundry is her domain, as it was her mothers. Throughout history, laundry has always been a predominantly feminine task. Up until quite recently to clean clothing was a physically taxing endeavour.

These works are created using the cyanotype process, which involves exposing pretreated material to direct sunlight. What is blocked from the light remains white and what is exposed to sunlight is turned blue. In order to reveal the image, the fabric must be rinsed thoroughly with water. One must knead the fabric in cold water until the water runs clear.

This aspect of the work was a humbling task, reinforcing for me the strength and power behind the hands of women, and the dignity behind activities that are deemed “women’s work”. The daily washings became my own meditative gesture, a period of time each day where I was connected to the physicality of my body, and the bodies of the women in my family before me, who have done the same activity over and over again. This action was a space to think, to contemplate, to connect, and try to feel in my body something of what they must have felt.

It is both an altar and a devotional gesture.