Artist from Japan
My mother, 82 years old, has lived in Japan, doing housework for her family for 60 years.
No retirement, no weekend. That’s very common for Japanese women of that generation. Her family feels at ease thanks to her contribution. She is like a comfortable sofa for her family but she doesn’t have her own chair.
I would like to offer her a comfortable cushion, hoping she can take a rest sometimes.
I decorated it in pink because she loves to go out dressing herself up.
Artist from USA
I am an ABC, an American Born Chinese; one woman with two cultures and three words that hold my life together: Faith, Hope and Love. The secret that holds my life together is in the box… and that is the radiance of Christ.
Faith – in Christ
Hope – in His future for me and my family
Love – in my heart for my family
my friends
my two countries
and my life in Him
Under His love, I have “new life.” The butterfly represents my life in Him. I’ve chosen this fabric, not just because it was left over from my dining room chairs (up-cycling) but also, because fabrics and interiors have been a big part of my life and career here in Taiwan for over 36 years.
My deepest truth is: Faith, hope and love in the Lord has guided and blessed my life in ways I could never have imagined or dreamt of.
Pyrometric cones play an important role in the process of making my ceramic sculpture. Although there are sophisticated instruments to measure temperature in a kiln, the cones are a more reliable indicator of the effect of TIME and HEAT on ceramic materials. The simple cone-shaped forms, each calibrated to melt at a specific temperature, can be observed through a peephole in the kiln door during a firing. As the cones bend, their reaction to the advancing temperature indicates how my sculpture is reacting.
My box represents my kiln, surrounded by previously fired “cone-pats”. It is mounted on a porcelain doily that symbolizes the interaction between my life as an artist and my rich, full domestic life.
Tajima Box Project. An artist and an extraordinary woman collaborate to create a box.
NANCY SODERBERG, FORMER SENIOR FOREIGN POLICY ADVISOR TO CLINTON, FORMER US AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS
My impression of Nancy is a study in contrasts: powerful authority figure/pretty, blonde hair, soft features. Woman, wife, stepmother/facing the horror of war on a daily basis.
But a singular vision: the world can change, war can be contained.
So, we have a soft, hand-stitched pillow – symbol of domesticity, a womanly art. In the colors of the UN flag, the ultimate multilateral institution, and round, like the diplomatic Round Table. A locked, but fragile glass box, its contents a weapon of powerful but intimate destruction: an M67 Fragmentation hand grenade. And the key tucked safely away in a pocket of the UN pillow.
This box symbolizes the entrapment of the domestic sphere. The witness of the box symbolizes the innocence and naiveté of women in the past. The sewing kit placed in the box makes reference to contemporary women artists of today who have used old skills from the domestic sphere and given them new life.
When two do not recognize their internal forces they remain prisoners of their facade and they add this facade to the other. Thus inevitably they will be attached to each other by an intricate chain, forgetting their own space, staying knotted and desperately isolated.
The central character in this visual story is the Hope Chest. I play a secondary role and I am represented here by the paper mache figure with the hole in her soul and an exposed heart. The setting “Life” is a jigsaw puzzle piece cut from a chess board.
The first things to be taken out of the chest are my sketchbook and pencil. There are three other items on the board and they symbolize external influences that always shadow my moves.
The contents of the chest are: two teddy bears, a doll, a key, a warm knitted blanket, a couple of books, paintings (my work and that of others), pencils, a tin angel and bits of coloured wire. All these items are needed by this nest builder to turn a room or apartment into HOME.
The colourful tin angel was given by a friend, here it means friendships and friends who are sometimes angels.
The colourful curly corkscrew bits of wire are the wonder and amazement that I carry around with me.
On the inside of the lid is a rejection notice from the New Yorker Magazine, and a letter written by my granny when she was 65. She lived and died in Latvia. She learned enough English to cobble together a now cherished letter to her 10 year old granddaughter.
I write a lot of letters and the stamps are the decals from my travels by mail.
Is there no greater suffering than “An American Girl, Shopping For A Husband”? In her single days, she would cry and cry over lost loves, covet the sacred purchases of keepsakes in hope for love, and dream endlessly for the one– a final purchase of the dream guy and live happily ever after.
Medium: The box, Ukranian egg dyes, silver and gold spray paint, floral wire, embroidery thread, wood ball, buttons and dominos, netting, yarn, plastic shopping bags, things girls buy, one groomsman cut in half, newspaper clipping, wire, crotchet needle, Modge Podge and Tacky glue.
Everywhere you go In Africa a woman is always present. Through my presentation I portray three major roles that make African women so precious in our society.
A woman does not only bear a child in her arms, wood on her head or a clay pot in her hands, she bears the daily burden of African experiences.
She is the strength of Africa and I hope that we can learn to appreciate what a woman does and the one who created her, God.
Like most domestic tools, the straight pin is usually considered a useful and innocuous object. I use thousands of them to make aggressive statements referencing handwork, domesticity and the female voice. The finished pieces are beautiful. They are also sharp and dangerous. Like the tiny pins that efficiently perform multiple household tasks, my work suggests more than what meets the eye. “Conflict” physically expresses endured emotional battles.
With my background in fiber art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I am intrigued by the works of George Segal, Edward and Nancy Kienholz, Cathy de Moncheaux, Annette Message, Louise Nevelson, Eva Heese and Ann Hamilton. Finally, the following excerpt, as read not in context, but taken from Anais Nin’s A Spy in the House of Love, 1968, pp. 6-7, sheds light on my ideological treatment of perception.
“She was like an actress who must compose a face, an attitude to meet the day…She must redesign the face, smooth the anxious brows, separate the crushed eyelashes, wash off the traces of secret, interior tears, accentuate the mouth as upon a canvas, so it will hold its luxuriant smile. Inner chaos, like those secret volcanoes which suddenly lift the neat furrows of a peacefully plowed field, awaited behind all disorders of face, hair and costume, for a fissure through which to explode.”
This work seeks to explore and express the constraints faced by contemporary women who live in public housing apartments–also known as Housing Development Board (HDB) flats–in Singapore. About 86% of Singaporeans are housed in these HDB flats. Like the vast majority, I too live in a HDB flat and one of the personal constraints that I face is the lack of physical space. This inspires me to conceptualize the given wooden box as a block of HDB flats with many dwellers within. Each of the niches in the box represents a female dweller. The different constraints faced, ranging from physical, emotional, mental, and social to religious realms, are reflected in the interior decoration of the units and the contents of the ampoules. Women from different phases in life–teenagers, singles, married with and without children, and retirees–are invited to participate in a survey, and their views are expressed collaboratively in this box.
We clean our house every day and throw the useless things away. But often our minds for years get filled with foolish thoughts and fears.
The Women's Voices: Jennifer Barton from WOMEN BEYOND BORDERS on Vimeo.
