Unknown Women or The Forgettable
This was a project of 32 cameo soap portraits which I carved using dentists’ tools.
I observed and photographed hundreds of women at a craft fair in an enormous aircraft hanger. All the women were older, comfortable and practical in their attire, all busy-bodding about with curiosity and ‘meddling with craft’ or ‘frittering alleviations of boredom and banality’ as some cynics would have conjectured – Why so many women in that space? What was happening here?
The art world often derides craft like society does older women, with the exception of accepted movements like Craftivism, critics have generally patronised and sniggered at craft.
What I witnessed was a whole generation of females nurturing something in themselves that they felt was important and necessary. I think that craft links these women to identity, fellowship, healing, conversance and intimacy, that within the perceived mediocrity and nothingness of craft, they escape. They shed a previous incarnation and then their ‘craft’ becomes an expression of love.
They are practicing being ‘in the flow’, of being free of oneself and therefore aiding their mental health. The fact that women become invisible in society influenced the material I chose for this project. Soap disintegrates and becomes nothing.
