Everyday Creativity: Women and domesticity – What’s your perspective?

Over the past ten years I have transformed the duster, a humble yellow cleaning cloth, into an object that embodies every day, domestic experience through the crafting of embroidered statements, stitch-drawings, and manipulations that research life in the home. Inspired by craftivist practices (Greer, 2014) and autoethnography as a method that uses ‘research, writing, story and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political’ (Ellis, 2004), this research with the duster is part of my long-standing collaborative arts project ‘Women and domesticity – What’s our Perspective?’ (fig.1), the focus of several publications (Marr, 2021), personal artworks (fig.2), numerous exhibitions, and the context of my current PhD.

Underpinned by Barthes seminal work Mythologies (1957) as a theoretical code by which we read the social meaning of things and act out accordingly, the duster provides a lens for the investigation of everyday domesticity through our innate knowledge of its purpose. Both myself and my project participants interact with it phenomenologically; consciously and unconsciously knowing it as both a cleaning cloth and as a narrative device. As evident within Bennet’s idea of vital materiality and ‘thing power’ (2004) within which our humanness and their innateness can appear to overlap, it has become an extension of my domestic experience and an ever-present conduit to my creative research in this area.