UNTITLED OBJECT SERIES

steel, black spray paint, concrete, plaster, bluestone oxide, bronze, iron nitrate, sulphur, cement, tablecloths, embroidery floss, 2021

Dimensions Variable

Photography by Chris Bowes

Untitled Object Series is a work of material translation that explores issues surrounding older women’s homelessness. As an expansion of previous works critiquing traditional female gender roles in domestic setting, this work turns its focus outwards to explore the consequences and implications for women whose homes are taken away from them due to factors such as domestic abuse, illness, breakdown of a relationship or financial pressure due to prolonged time spent in caring roles. This often results in minimal savings and superannuation. This series of objects aim to spark a conversation about the increasing percentage of older women experiencing homelessness. As the needs of this demographic are different to others who experience homelessness, women often to not interact with most available community services and find themselves struggling to find services tailored to their health and care requirements. This work serves to open a discourse surrounding the need for community services tailored to vulnerable women’s specific needs and the invisible and fast growing demographic of older unhoused women in Australia. 

Each element of this series has been translated from its domestic and utilitarian origin into another material form to convey meaning. The steel frames representing the motif of the house are suspended in the air in states of disarray to represent the instability and uncertainty of many women’s living situations. The three textile works use found tablecloths from the 40s to 60s eras as surfaces to convey maxims related to the explored topic. Not everyone is kind, some are cruel in fact relates to the relationships and environments surrounding vulnerable women. Without a silver spoon in her mouth relates to the idiom “born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth” that relates to wealth and status and particularly individuals that are born into inherited wealth. This saying has been distorted to highlight the fact that many women are born into poverty or are caught in cycles of poverty which become limiting factors for financial independence and stability. 

The wooden spoons translated into bronze draw on the notion of the traditional kitchen and gendered role of the female as homemaker. Cast in solid, heavy bronze and placed on a concrete representation of the chopping block the warm, idealised notion of the female homemaker becomes cold and lifeless. The bottles stacked up as though comprising an ‘empties pile’ were moulded from antique liquor flagons and cast in concrete and plaster to create a heavy and ominous pile. These act as a motif for domestic and substance abuse as inflammatory factors contributing to older women’s homelessness. Finally, the bronze casts of tin cans again draw on the domestic setting of the kitchen and through material translation transition from a motif of nutrition and sustenance to one of decay and neglect. As each of the objects and their meaning come to be read as one, this body of work seeks to give voice to a demographic which is often unheard and overlooked.