Texere: The Unfinished Work of Domestic Assemblage

Texere: The Unfinished Work of Domestic Assemblage, 2014.


Digital Photograph, 30cm x 20cm.

This work was created for the cover of a special issue of the journal Home Cultures, on the theme 'Alternative Domesticities: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Home and Sexuality'. The work attempts to visualise some of the ‘queerness’ of domesticity, taking seventeenth and eighteenth century Baroque still life painting as its starting point. Still life, especially from the Dutch Republic, often referenced domestic themes through the arrangement of domestic objects – food, flowers, fruit, textiles, tools, vases, ceramics, cutlery, etc. This art-historical tradition highlights the importance of the domestic for understanding historical, geographical and social processes. The piece attempts to evoke the materiality and tacility of the domestic. In doing so, the work seeks to elicit contemporary cross-disciplinary themes about the domestic as: a process, a weaving, a representation, a text, an assemblage, an ongoing labour, sensorial, unfinished, messy, and polyvalent. Every element within the image is a textile, making reference to the Latin root of both text and textile – texere – a weaving. Text, textile and representation are always weavings: in this case, a weaving of the domestic as an assemblage of materials, and a process of labour, that is layered, multifaceted and enduring.