Pressing Topics — THE IRONING MAIDENS

Pressing Topics is a series of multi media projection/mapping, sculpture, digital collage, video art, instrument design and sound art works that uses the iron, as the iconic symbol of domestic labour, to explore the transglobal workforce behind the production of domestic technology and the gendered and racialised nature of the industries.

The conceptual framework of the visual elements of this project employs a glitch feminism lens to explore themes of gender socialisation, equality and labour. Imagery drawn from popular culture and social media is sampled and collaged to explore these themes. Projection is used to create windows into the items (tea towels, irons, ironing boards) so that the unseen labour is revealed.

Strike - Projection, sculpture, lighting.

‘Strike’ is a projection sculpture using mapped video footage, animated elements and domestic objects. The work foregrounds low and unpaid labour. It references the biased, factory hiring strategies that exploit and enforce the sterotype of “nimble fingers”, and the impact this detailed and repetitive work has on women’s bodies.

This trend that has moved from the fashion industry to the IT and new tech sector is seeing millions of women existing in modern day slavery conditions. Their slavery builds irons, for other slaves to iron. The irony is real.

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‘They burn with a strange fury’ projection and sculpture

“They (seem to) burn with a strange fury”, a comment by a critic of the original Wages for Housework activists of the 1970’s, is the title of this work. An algorithm was used to explore the extent of our gendered programing within our media. The search terms used in online video and image libraries were the words ‘cleaner’ and ‘housework’. The top image results from these search terms are usually women and particularly, women of colour. Their image titles include terms like: “asian housekeeper, beautiful woman holding laundry detergent, cleaning service concept positive asian woman, loony woman housewife”. The work explores how we are building gender stereotypes into our current and future media content. These images are projected onto ironing boards that stand around a burning fire of irons. Are they planning a revolution? Are they burning the tools that oppress them?

Oscillations