Women’s Work, Fly Girls

Women’s Work is a collection of 20+ fabric panels illustrating the variation and importance of women’s work during the last 150 years. These two panels are part of the series.

This project honors the history of working women through textiles and hand-colored photographs while also preserving some of the manifestations of their creative handwork. I have added my own printed and dyed fabrics, as well as hand stitching and other embellishments. It is distillation of methods and techniques I have explored over the years.

The themes explored in this exhibition are several: first, that women’s work, often unpaid and undervalued, is the backbone of the family, from childcare to domestic chores. Before the introduction of labor-saving devices, this work was all-encompassing, exhausting, and never-ending.

Second, the labor of women became a necessity during the world wars when women entered nontraditional jobs, taking the place of the men at war. Women proved they are competent as welders, mechanics, airline pilots, etc. The biases against women in the workforce were temporarily dissolved by the circumstances of war.

Third, women’s handwork (sewing, quilting, knitting, embroidery, etc.) is an undervalued form of artistic expression. For ladies of leisure, it was a pleasant pastime. For the lower classes, it was a necessity—sewing and knitting clothes for the family, repurposing old clothing into quilts and braided rugs. Much of this handwork is worthy of the title Art, but because of the medium (textiles) it is relegated to a lower rung on the art ladder.