Invisible Labour
These photographs, exhibited at STACC Gallery in September 2019, are an outcome of a participatory public art program I undertook with support from Brimbank City Council's Art Spaces Activation Partnership Funding.
"Invisible Labour is a social, physical, performative and visual exploration of personal limits."
Referencing historical feminist consciousness raising strategies, this project sought to utilise participatory making circles and group discussion to publicly expose the structural veiling of contemporary gendered labour inequities in the private sphere. By engaging with the local community's diverse experiences shouldering unpaid care work, I hoped to expand the project's frame of reference beyond my own. People were invited to stitch words in gold thread on lightweight chiffon to represent the value of the unpaid labour they undertake or benefit from.
The project acted as live research site, unearthing a vast lack of capacity in those undertaking care work to participate in a voluntary 'leisure' project. Each session, community members, new mothers, theatre, gallery and park attendees, seniors groups and cultural social groups would all curiously approach me and warmly discuss their experiences before declining to participate in the making. It quickly became clear that those actively engaging in care work did not have the time to participate in creative drop in sessions, even when keenly interested. Elderly community members often told me sadly that they now lacked the eyesight or manual dexterity needed to participate. Many others told me of mothers or sisters who had possessed great skill and love for embroidery and felt they themselves were not able to meet the standard. No matter how many times I emphasised that the quality of the stitch was unimportant to my project it was clear that, for many, the skill with which such tasks had been undertaken by their mothers, sisters and grandmothers was their personal benchmark of worthiness, and not to be underdelivered upon. Conversely, those for whom the project did not resonate - predominantly those not undertaking unpaid care work - were generally disinterested and did not participate even if they did have capacity.
A subsequent planned participatory performance event, testing my personal physical limits under the weight of the resultant stitched fabric pieces had to be reconsidered given the lack of creative engagement. Each session, I travelled between my home and the St Albans Community Centre through an industrial zone that is rapidly being transformed into new residential estates. As I mused upon the economic value, visibility and subsequent social validity of work that is attributed to industrial labour roles and its contrast to the invisibility of unpaid care work, I became increasingly interested in staging a physical intervention in the local industrial landscape. Unpaid care work, as labour given out of love and chosen with free will, is a kind of relentless and taxing labour that does not receive remuneration or the protections of industrial labour,The symbolic intervention of care work into industrial work zones seeks to visualise the value of care work undertaken in the private sphere (and often underpaid in the commercial sector), simultaneously giving profile to ongoing debates about the structural value of some forms of labour over others.
Invisible Labour remains an ongoing project.