Attempted Efforts of a Gentle Woman
Medium: Single Channel Video - 3 minutes 49 seconds, Mixed Media, Archival Pigment Print
Materials: tea bags, thread, transparent marbles, wood, string
In an effort to expand the process and potential learning and unlearning, The Attempted Efforts of a Gentle Woman communicates across a breadth of media including painting, collage, photography, and video. These works are seemingly distinct from one another, yet they are rooted in a deep knowledge of what it is to be in a body, to be female, and still searching and trying. Simultaneously the works offer space for questions, peculiarities, and slow observation. The video documents a staged visual and audible journey of reclaiming domesticity. Reclamation is a result of inherited tendencies towards order, as well as a felt, spiritual practice - a self-proclaimed way to move energy and reset, repeated again, and again.
The photographs offer a glimpse into (failed) attempts at women’s work: cleaning, cooking, creating beauty, and softness. Trying. Using deconstructed tea bags – emptied of their herbs and leaves – pressed flat and stitched back together, they begin to resemble a pocket or pouch holding one singular transparent marble. Twenty-eight pouches representing the ideal menstrual cycle are suspended from a simple structure of wood and string, nostalgic of clothing lines, and like an advent calendar, counting down to vulnerability.
