Zoom Background
As work has invaded our homes in a sinister way, changing our domestic landscape forever, after three years I look at my personal overall positive experience of switching from office-based work to homeworking.
This change has made my life easier to manage after I suffered a "wobble", my mental health started to play up and my daily routines started to feel too much for me. Suddenly, I was unable to cope with normal daily stress.
I did not feel my workplace at that time was equipped to help me, the opportunity of being safe at home has been the best thing that could have happened to me. It gave me space and time to breathe and put the puzzle back together and although some pieces might be lost forever, I feel alright.
With this project I want to answer some of the assumptions I have heard during these years of homeworkers often depicted as sad, lonely individuals disconnected from the real world, working in their half pyjamas, using inadequate equipment, multitasking without excelling in any of the assignments.
The Lady Well
As a young girl I was unaware of what fertility really meant. With time, however, I realised how this single element can shape a woman’s life. The Lady Well and its history inspired me. I imagined women visiting this place as part of some hopeful ritual, a place associated with fertility and a symbol of the female womb. I thought how bleeding represented a monthly reminder of a woman’s connection to nature, life, pain and death and how the 14th day of the menstrual cycle, the most fertile, was such a vulnerable temporal window into life itself. By visiting this holy place, passage into Mother Earth, we reach out to her, we drink from a stream leading into it, a symbol of the union of male and female.
Five six seven wait
Five six seven wait is an ongoing project portraying young dancers from Oxfordshire at a time when all pandemic related restrictions are finally lifted, and the wait is over. A time when art gives them purpose and the energy to start again. Dance is healing, communicative, celebratory, joyful, and powerful. Used as a form of protest, it can spark political and social change.
Victor, 17
“I dance because I want to move people that are watching me. Like, you know when you're watching a film and you turn to your friend and say, 'I’ve got goosebumps' that's exactly the feeling that I want people to experience when they watch me dance.”
Aisha, 16
“I dance for relief of everyday life, and to express my emotions and feelings”.
This is rebels using grace and determination, hard workers, and healthy carriers of values to be transmitted. This is a way to celebrate their commitment to art and the spreading of the emotional contagion that needs to be infectious.
Opticks
Inspired by a book by English natural philosopher Isaac Newton:
Opticks or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light.
The book analyses the fundamental nature of light by means of the refraction of light with prisms and lenses, the diffraction of light by closely spaced sheets of glass, and the behaviour of colour mixtures with spectral lights or pigment powders.
Afternoons
A pocket of time in the day where my responsibilities as a mother collided with nurturing my passion, or so it seemed. The only way to do both, in order to use the last hour of natural light available, was to work with my boys, getting them involved in the different school assignments and the creative process which would itself become as important as the final image.
A camera as a tool, not only to document family special events or indeed the everyday, but used to create art together and therefore getting to know each other at a deeper level.
Fusion of art and souls
The merging of roles, womanhood and motherhood, represented in intimate portraits. Blurred lines of relationships, with my children and myself, how they are intertwined and impossible to separate.