…this weekend has been full of writing a paper, and trying to untangle this yarn that I dyed a few weeks ago. It is patons cotton which I over-dyed with two shades of red, and which I intend to turn into this top from the excellent DROPS Design range of amazing patterns.

It is extremely tangled. I have so far spent around three hours trying to untangle it.

When not untangling this yarn, I have been trying to untangle the interconnected ideas I want to relay in the paper I’m presenting on Friday this week, at the woman’s place conference in Newcastle. I haven’t written a paper or presented one before, so I’m both excited and quite nervous… I always feel when I write that I haven’t explained anything enough; that everything requires more explanation… that each tangent needs to be neatly tied back into the comprehensive whole that is the main body of the text. As with the tangled yarn, it is sometimes difficult to bring order to the chaos… I am loving the books I’m re-reading for this paper… here are some thoughts, some quotes, some images. Maybe the tangled thoughts can be turned into a lovely, shining thing. Perhaps the tangled yarn can become a neat ball of yarn, ready to knit.

I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother.
I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supportive, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I “do” Art.
Now I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art. I will live in the museum as I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition…and do all these things as public Art activities: I will sweep and wax the floors, dust everything, wash the walls… cook, invite people to eat… etc.
MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK.
– Mierle Laderman Ukeles, taken from her 1969 Manifesto for an exhibition

Women had been embedded in houses for centuries and had quilted, sewed, baked, cooked, decorated, and nested their creative energies away. What would happen, we wondered, if women took those very same homemaking activities and carried them to fantasy proportions?
…Room after room took shape until the house became a total environment, a repository of female experience, and womanly dreams.
Womanhouse provided a context for work that both in technique and in content revealed feminine experience. There were quilts and curtains, sewn sculptures, bread-dough pieces, and a crocheted room… Womanhouse became both an environment that housed the work of women artists working out of their own experiences, and the “house” of female reality into which one entered to experience the real facts of women’s lives, feelings and concerns.
– Judy Chicago, Through the flower: My struggle as a woman artist

Waiting for my children to come home from school
Waiting for them to grow up, to leave home
Waiting to be myself
Waiting for excitement
Waiting for him to tell me something interesting, to ask me how I feel
Waiting for him to stop being crabby, reach for my hand, kiss me good morning
Waiting for fulfillment
Waiting for the children to marry
Waiting for something to happen Waiting . . .
Waiting to lose weight
Waiting for the first gray hair
Waiting for menopause
Waiting to grow wise
Waiting . . .
Waiting for my body to break down, to get ugly
Waiting for my flesh to sag
Waiting for my breasts to shrivel up
Waiting for a visit from my children, for letters
Waiting for my friends to die
Waiting for my husband to die Waiting . . .
Waiting to get sick
Waiting for things to get better
Waiting for winter to end
Waiting for the mirror to tell me that I’m old
Waiting for a good bowel movement
Waiting for the pain to go away
Waiting for the struggle to end
Waiting for release
Waiting for morning
Waiting for the end of the day
Waiting for sleep Waiting . . .
– Taken from the poem Waiting, by Faith Wilding, Waiting – performance for Womanhouse

…The choices are before her: to deny her sex, and become an honorary man, which is an immensely costly proceeding in terms of psychic energy, or to accept her sex and with it second place, as the artist’s consort…To live alone without emotional support is difficult and wearing and few artists have been able to survive it. For all artists the problem is one of finding one’s own authenticity, of speaking in a language or imagery that is essentially ones own, but if one’s self-image is dictated by one’s relation to others and all one’s activities are other-directed, it is simply not possible to find one’s own voice.’ – Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race

Bobby Baker felt, all the time at Saint Martins, an anxiety that someone would tap her on the shoulder and say, ‘you can’t be an artist, you are a woman.’…She made a cake, carved a boot from it,, decorated it with icing, and looked at it. The revelation that she then describes, ‘the new thought’ that shone, was that this cake was no more a cake, it was a sculpture. It was a work of art just as Anthony Caro’s huge sculptures were.
– Bobby Baker, Redeeming Features of Daily Life

I believe there is a way of writing, singing, dancing and making art about domestic space that asserts the power and history of woman’s contribution to that space, which articulates such assertions from an empowered, first-person point of view, and which acknowledges the historical fact of woman’s relationship to the home.
This is the approach I hope to take in my work with the domestic soundscape.
– Felicity Ford, sound artist