Drawings from: How to be a Good Housewife

1998 - 2000

This group of drawings is from a body of work based on housewife manuals from the 1950's and 60's. The series is comprised of 80 drawings in total. They are all pencil on paper, varying in size from 12" x 9" to 14" x 11". This series also includes mpeg video and mixed media sculpture (see "The Cleaning Woman" exhibit).

The drawings were started before the birth of my first son. Prior to that event, my views on the role of women in the workplace were a primary focus of the artwork I was creating. During this time I had been living in New York City for several years, working as a carpenter to pay the rent.

At this period in my life I saw myself as a woman struggling to fit into a mold that had been cast only for men. I welcomed the struggle and it became part of the fabric of my self-image as an artist. As I worked alongside my male counterparts in the business (one of which was my husband), I was compelled to read old housekeeping manuals from the 1950's and 60's (which were, not surprisingly, written by men).

In my artwork, I created a persona of the unstable woman that I might have been if I had lived then, a woman struggling with the role of the "happy homemaker", dutifully devouring self-help manuals, carrying out what I consider to be the most mindless and mundane of daily tasks. These drawings are part of the body of work from that persona, a body of work that also includes sculptures, paintings, photographs, and mpeg videos.

In 1999, I gave birth to my first son, Max. I gave up the artistic vision of that insane woman and her drawings for a real life in the home. One might say that I lost my sense of humor about the woman, now that I was, in a strange way, actually living that life.
With my number one priority being my new son, my artistic vision became unclear. I fought the stigma of the new role that had been forced upon me, and it took a long time to carve out a new identity which was a comfortable fit for me in this new life.

Today, I look back on this series with a renewed sense of humor. My identity as a woman working in a male dominated field, which had been so vital to my creativity and my artistic life, has been replaced by a completely new one. Although I still have great feeling for the inequalities between men and women, I don’t need to live as an example of that fact in order to understand it.

My second son, Jasper, was born in 2004. In some strange way, his birth confirms part of the “new” me; still an artist, but now also a mother, a caregiver, a 24/7 worker, a homemaker and a homebuilder- but now, importantly, a creator of another human life.

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