Domestic was made over 18 months from household textiles; old pyjamas, worn shirts, a bed sheet torn when washed with a set of keys. The starting point was to use everything, waste nothing. What the making revealed was more complex.
The front of the quilt holds the patterns of domestic life: harmony and happiness alongside compromise, rupture and repair. The reverse pushes further into what domesticity can also mean: coercion, violence, the hidden side of the home. At the time I was working alongside women who had experienced domestic and sexual exploitation, many caught within the UK’s immigration and criminal justice systems. Their presence, and the impact they had on me, is in the cloth.
For the exhibition I made eight jars of jam from locally grown fruit, the lids sewn from the same fabric remnants as the quilt, spelling the word DOMESTIC. Each jar was labelled with a darker association with domesticity – exploitation, labour, violence etc. Visitors were invited to share their own associations with the word ‘domestic’ in exchange for a jar.
