Domestic Dusters: Exploring threat in vulnerable communities. An investigation of isolation and dislocation through embroidery of a duster.

This paper presents work from my award-winning collaborative research project Domestic Dusters, which invites women from across the globe to embroider their domestic experiences onto yellow dusters. Established in 2015, the 800+ ever growing collection is exhibited internationally in arts, community and academic contexts (fig. 1) alongside publications that explore the duster as a research tool through drawing with thread (Marr 2019), storytelling through craft as a feminist practice (Marr 2021), domesticated experiences of academia (Marr, 2023), and stitch-drawing into a duster as an autoethnographic practice for personal wellbeing (2025). Collectively, these dusters display perspectives on home and its often-gendered expectations, capturing experiences of both privilege and hardship as embroidered words and images, with humour, sadness, anger, frustration and joy.
Dusters were selected as a metaphor for domesticity because of their cultural associations with invisible gendered labour (Kirkham 1996), whilst the use of hand embroidery women’s legacy of working with cloth (Barber, 1996), its association with oppression (Parker 1984) and more recent empowerment (Greer 2014). Participants are invited via an open call or through funded initiatives with community partners, addressing domestic issues from everyday discrimination through to unpaid care, gender-based violence, and asylum seeking. In each instance, the gendered inequalities of domestic labour that serve to threaten every aspect of women’s lives are at the fore, positioning this mundane domestic object to give women a voice where they are silenced, ignored and unheard.
In line with the conference theme, it shares dusters embroidered by women whose domestic circumstances are under threat due to two contrasting situations, capturing the lived experience of enforced home confinement by unpaid carers, and dislocation from their own homes by asylum seekers living in temporary accommodation. Produced through community partnerships with We Care who campaign for the rights of unpaid carers, and Makani who work for the empowerment of refugee women, this research ‘strives for social justice’ (Adams, Holman Jones and Ellis, 2015, p.2) and offers insights into domesticity under siege through the lens of a humble yellow duster.