When I began this project in the Summer of 1997, I knew I wanted to make a personally significant work of art to mark the Millennium. It was a gift to the women in our family to help us understand where we’ve come from and to celebrate how far we’ve progressed.
In the process, I came to understand that many of the decisions we make in life are not deliberate but result from the economic, social and political events of the times. It is how we cope with events beyond our control that is a measure of our lives.
With the completion of this series I have not only learned so much about our Canadian history but have achieved great personal and artistic satisfaction. I wanted my art to communicate. People were initially captivated by the sculptures but when they realized the social history unfolding, they started to tell their own stories. As I had hoped, “Home Economics” gets people talking.
“Home Economics” is a series of wall-mounted sculptures of women in doorways, one for each decade of the 20th century. Each figure is an interpretation of a woman of that decade and her stance in the doorway is a metaphor for her perceived position in society.
It’s about your mother, your grandmother, your sister… yourself. It’s accessible art, it’s fun, it gets people talking, yet it has poignant underlying messages. As individual sculptures, each woman has a story to tell and the viewer invariably has a story in response. When the ten pieces are viewed as a whole, the cyclical patterns emerge.
Turn of the Century: Home Is Where The Hearth Is
With hard work and firm resolve, we gratefully tackled the opportunities of our new country in a new century. We knew our place: to provide a warm hearth , an abundant harvest, and healthy heirs to work the land.
The Twenties: Rebellion with an Attitude
Out from the chaos of WW1, we challenged all the social conventions. We cut off our tresses, we shortened our dresses and we smoked cigarettes! Such an attitude…but we never got off the porch.
The Forties: Keep the Home Fires Burning
When men went off to war, women stepped in and kept the assembly lines rolling. We welded, we rationed and we waited for word from overseas.
The Sixties: Liberation!
Free from unwanted pregnancies, unsuccessful marriages and unwieldy undergarments, the liberation movement takes off. There are no limits… the world is ours to conquer!
The Eighties: The Me Generation
Assertive, well-educated and confident, we knew we could have it all…after all, we’d been competing for position since our kindergarten line-ups.
