The Labor of Love
Anjali Arasasingham
Cooking, cleaning, tending, bathing, mixing, scrubbing, brushing, nursing, holding, stirring, sewing, threading, embroidering, weaving, knitting, crocheting.
The Labor of Love interrogates the different facets of maternal labor, drawing connections between housework and typically laborious feminine craft. Crocheting, knitting, and other textile arts have all been historically disregarded as a serious art, instead being relegated to “women’s work” despite their pivotal role in social movements. This project celebrates the tradition of craft while questioning the necessity of labor in women’s and mother’s lives. Featuring the effects of unequal divisions of labor on household dynamics, the Wages for Housework movement, and several maternal textile artists, this project illuminates the arduous, invisible, and infinitely artful work of mothers. Every messy stitch, loose thread, and reworked strand. Where the needle becomes both a political tool and an instrument of devotion.
Taking inspiration from birth certificates, sewing manuals, and scrapbooks, layouts feature strict grids, vacant lines, bureaucratic hierarchies, and exhaustive content. Simulating acts of tedious labor, design choices force viewers to repeatedly weave through pages with their eyes. Images, printed onto sheer paper, are meant to emulate the feeling of flipping through a scrapbook.
By juxtaposing memory and reality through the lens of craft, The Labor of Love reveals the unseen and intimate gestures that mothers perform daily. Motherhood is hard, tedious, and unfair work, but it is beautiful and meaningful work. It is a labor of love.