Domesticity UnHinged / Fem Salon
A series of exhibitions in San Francisco galleries including Ictus, Million Fishes, and Play Space
2011-2013 Food as material
This series of exhibitions was the beginning of an ongoing exploration of domestic products as material: sugar, bacon, caul fat, wool, cabbage, potatoes, as the basis of installations and actions. The restrained and visceral power of the domestic is a continued conversation with feminism and embodiment, iconic basic elements of daily life (spoon, table, bread) changed in dimension and substance. Enacting feral form of domesticity, the works explored itinerancy and settledness, desire for stability and burden of the domestic, that raw push and pull of home, amidst the collective uncertainty of economic melt down, foreclosures and shifting sands.
Each exhibition included a physical action: a meal, a séance: washing hair of audience members. The pungent smell of the 14 pounds of bacon stitched with suture material was a physical experience unto itself, at one point threatening to close down the architecture department of CCA, sited in proximity to the gallery.
I worked in a county health center as a nurse for 20 years. Now I stand at a high table stitching spare body parts of dryer lint, debris, cow’s abdominal fat,.This heart like torso has a wool blanket as base, actually the blanket my mother in law was sleeping under when she died and is covered with caul fat, the lacy material lining the abdominal cavity