Highly Strung, 2020

Highly Strung, 2020, Installation, Sizes Variable, Embroidery on Fabric.
Guggenheim Collection.

A durational body of work, produced over the course of a whole year, in which I made a record of an act of invisible labour that I have accomplished, one for every day of the year. These acts are mundane and rather banal but are the sum of my every day, as mother, wife, carer and woman.

Each statement is carefully embroidered onto an item found within the home, be it an old dish rag, muslin, a pair of trousers, a breastpad, an old burp cloth or a cleaning cloth, and presented, highly strung, on a washing line. The installation invites the audience to navigate through the space, almost encased by the sheer vastness of the work, serving to make the invisible visible and tangible. Highly Strung explores notions of motherhood, domesticity and the invisibility of a woman’s labour.

Following on from my most recent solo show titled Out Of Service (2019. Cubitt, London); which presented a body of embroidered works countering nostalgic notions of the ‘domestic,’ instead repositioning it as a political site exploring its relationship to artistic work, repetition, care work, paid/unpaid, cleaning, parenting and the working body; grew a durational body of work titled Highly Strung (2020).

Over the course of a whole year, I made a daily record of an act of invisible labour that I have performed for my home or household.

I isolated a single act and recorded it for each day, thus compiling a list of 365 individual acts over the course of the year.

These menial tasks and chores, whether sweeping up toast crumbs, changing nappies, doing night feeds, packing lunchboxes, changing bed sheets or doing the school run are repetitive and cyclical. Many of these acts are physically labour intensive, while others weigh down on a woman’s mental load, ever incessant and relentless and add (on average) an extra 10 hours of unpaid labour on top of a full-time working woman’s job compared to men.

These tasks are often considered minor when set aside individually. Wiping children’s snotty noses, washing the dishes, sweeping up Lego pieces, yet the sum of all of them cumulatively makes for something wildly more substantial. In isolating these menial tasks and making a conscious effort to record them, I serve to highlight (and shun) their invisibility.

Each of the 365 acts of invisible labour that I have recorded has been personally embroidered onto a piece of fabric tied to the domestic space.

The collection of items is installed side by side, quite literally highly strung on clothing lines, as a pun,referring to one’s tense and distressed state of mind.

The sheer power behind this work is in its enormity, where a woman’s acts of invisible labour are presented in a tangible and quantified manner, inviting the audience to navigate through it.

The pricing of the work is also intrinsic to the conceptual understanding of it. It’s been calculated based on working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for one whole year, at an hourly rate of £8.72 - the lowest minimum wage band for over 25s in the UK. It’s an attempt to quantify the labour force of motherhood that is both unpaid and undervalued in society.

Photos by Naela El-Assad.