COLLECTED AND SHARED EXPERIENCES OF LABOR MADE VISIBLE
Participant documentation: M.J. Bensen, Carpool, etched acrylic; Ami Sumey, Cleaning kitchen, surface clean bathrooms, vacuum and do laundry, both 12” x 9“, 2022. Installation image by Aaron Wessling, Portland Art Documentation.
Mothering, not Othering:
A dear friend of mine — an artist and mother of three, Ashley Addair — told me she woke up one day “with the sense that mothering is the opposite of othering.” Someone who mothers embraces, nurtures, and offers belonging to others. The term, mother, aligns with the historical gendered imbalance of invisible and unpaid labor: 42% of women in the world cannot secure jobs because they are responsible for caregiving and women and girls provide more than 75% of unpaid labor and care in the world.
Identity is altered when mothering becomes primary, dominating physical and emotional time. At the beginning of the pandemic, when I felt trapped in my home with my youngest child amid domestic labor without reprieve, my home felt heavy, overwhelming, and claustrophobic. I often track regulatory runs with the app MapMyRun (GPS). While completing domestic chores in the home during the initial months of the pandemic, I became acutely aware of how these chores were increasingly dysregulating, exponentially so. I documented ten individual domestic acts of invisible/unpaid labor (vacuuming, cleaning the house, organizing a storage area, for example) via MapMyRun, and transferred these to translucent acrylic as a record and evidence of my invisible labor, of caregiving, of mothering.
Please join me in a Mothering and More project to create a cumulative record of this labor — of caregiving, of mothering. This project is for all women-identifying caregivers, supporting research that partnerships of different sexes see the most significant disparity in domestic labor. If you choose to participate, your invisible labor record will be etched on two 12” x 9” acrylic pieces, one for the project and one to be sent back to you. The collected etchings will be part of a larger exhibition. Your record and information about the “more” of who you are beyond invisible labor will also be posted on this website. Contribute here
— Victoria Smits