Curator's Note
Some exhibitions arrive fully formed, sculpted and shaped by the artist and
presented in its final format to the curator, ready to hang. Others grow slowly
through conversations between curator and artist, shifting and becoming over
weeks, months or longer. Home-Maker was the latter. A kernel of an idea was
presented during open submissions - a performance of a role, now semi-
autobiographical, of wife, of mother and of homemaker and the presentation
of an exhibition within an exhibition. The result is an exhibited performance
by the artist in the artist’s own home which was acted out to anyone that drops
by while these performative acts are documented and displayed
simultaneously at gallery shush to no one at all.
Unperceived existence and its utilisation of the underground space of gallery
shush redirects the restrictions surrounding gender, motherhood and societal
expectations as public rather than private matters in art, recreating the
parameters away from the glass ceiling along a different route, one
determined by the artists themselves.
Using humour and inverting and subverting the public and private the artist
raises questions around gender roles, what it means to be a maker and a
mother. No audience steps within the gallery space, instead they are invited
into the artist’s home. The active documentation of the usually invisible labour
that takes place in private, performed day to day by the mother and
homemaker is exhibited, making them visible and putting them on view. The
photographs themselves put the artist on view as she performs her tasks yet
at the same time obscure and hide her identity from the viewer; and the
photographs’ content play on what is and is not seen through the choices the
artist makes on what task and roles are made public, and which remain private.
Novermber 2018
Laura Bradshaw-Heap