ImMaterial 2023
MIGHT COULD Art Project Space
The ImMaterial project was created by Antonia O’Mahony & I, an artful social activist duo. It is a collaborative community based printmaking project - one year in the making, over 100 hours in the community and 100 participants later, we constructed a nine meter tall installation to highlight and honour unpaid labour done in the domestic setting.
For six months we ran workshops with unsung heroes of invisible labour amongst groups such as: New Plymouth Women’s Centre, Bell Block Women’s Fellowship, Closely Knit and Migrant Women Meet at Puke Ariki Library, Flourish Taranaki Community Parenting Hub, Out of the Blue Studio, Molly Ryan Lifecare and MIGHT COULD.
At each stop, we taught a portable, water-based, no-skill-necessary printmaking process: trace monotype. We based imagery, which participants could trace, around household labour: a toilet brush, a woman making a bed, a gardening tool, food chopping, cat feeding, baby carrying. Collecting prints along the way, we amassed over 500 handmade prints to create a monumental two-story sculpture which we engineered and installed in MIGHT COULD Art Project Space.
The sculpture hangs 9 metres high, from floor to ceiling. The form is reminiscent of a well, evoking the ancient task of water collection, which has forever been fundamental to domestic life, while its aim is to foreground the many hours of home-based labour that support our daily lives. The many hands that spent hours in domestic labour are the many hands that built this installation turning the invisible into the visible and the immaterial into material.
With support from: New Plymouth District Council, Creative New Zealand through the Creative Communities Scheme.
MIGHT COULD Art Project Space
The ImMaterial project was created by Antonia O’Mahony & I, an artful social activist duo. It is a collaborative community based printmaking project - one year in the making, over 100 hours in the community and 100 participants later, we constructed a nine meter tall installation to highlight and honour unpaid labour done in the domestic setting.
For six months we ran workshops with unsung heroes of invisible labour amongst groups such as: New Plymouth Women’s Centre, Bell Block Women’s Fellowship, Closely Knit and Migrant Women Meet at Puke Ariki Library, Flourish Taranaki Community Parenting Hub, Out of the Blue Studio, Molly Ryan Lifecare and MIGHT COULD.
At each stop, we taught a portable, water-based, no-skill-necessary printmaking process: trace monotype. We based imagery, which participants could trace, around household labour: a toilet brush, a woman making a bed, a gardening tool, food chopping, cat feeding, baby carrying. Collecting prints along the way, we amassed over 500 handmade prints to create a monumental two-story sculpture which we engineered and installed in MIGHT COULD Art Project Space.
The sculpture hangs 9 metres high, from floor to ceiling. The form is reminiscent of a well, evoking the ancient task of water collection, which has forever been fundamental to domestic life, while its aim is to foreground the many hours of home-based labour that support our daily lives. The many hands that spent hours in domestic labour are the many hands that built this installation turning the invisible into the visible and the immaterial into material.
With support from: New Plymouth District Council, Creative New Zealand through the Creative Communities Scheme.
