69 Toys, Dagmara Bilton
In January of this year I was asked by artist curator Amy Digman to join Desperate Artwives,
www.desperateartwives.co.uk/
a collective of accomplished female artists, whose creative practice interrogates their experience of being 'wives' and mothers, and questions social expectations and values, which frame this role.
Perhaps it is because many women's lives are so subsumed in the mess of the body and the home, that women artists have explored the Abject and the domestic (Abramovic, Bourgeois, Chadwick) and these are recurring themes in my own work. I choose to work from home rather than from a dedicated studio space because I value the interaction between the work I make and the stuff of daily living. In keeping with the domestic subject matter of my work, my techniques are low-tech, and my materials of choice are those easily to hand.
For some time I have been producing work about dirt, cleaning and domestic household chores.
www.desperateartwives.co.uk/
a collective of accomplished female artists, whose creative practice interrogates their experience of being 'wives' and mothers, and questions social expectations and values, which frame this role.
Perhaps it is because many women's lives are so subsumed in the mess of the body and the home, that women artists have explored the Abject and the domestic (Abramovic, Bourgeois, Chadwick) and these are recurring themes in my own work. I choose to work from home rather than from a dedicated studio space because I value the interaction between the work I make and the stuff of daily living. In keeping with the domestic subject matter of my work, my techniques are low-tech, and my materials of choice are those easily to hand.
For some time I have been producing work about dirt, cleaning and domestic household chores.
Long running project Art of Clean further blurs the line between art and life. I am engaged in cleaning jobs at Cambridge Women's Aid and at student accomodation in Cambridge. Out of this work are developing a number of arts projects. I have worked with women on drawings of clutter, and we are now working on a project about childhood homes. I am also developing with ARU students, a project documenting the personal possesions and clutter in their rooms.