WEAVINGS OF CARE
Weaving of Care brings together paintings that examine everyday labor as a site where memory, violence, and resistance converge. Nets, fish, basins, fabrics, and repetitive gestures bring often-overlooked forms of labor to the forefront, revealing how practices of care sustain both life and the social structures that have historically devalued them.
The works draw upon domestic, fishing, and communal practices to suggest that washing, mending, sewing, untangling nets, cleaning a space, or preparing food are gestures through which life is continually sustained. Precisely because they are repeated each day, these acts seldom endure in collective memory. Yet they carry profound political and affective significance.
Just as women's bodies have historically been subjected to regimes of labor, care, and reproduction, water has likewise been reduced to a resource available for extraction and consumption. Both have been imagined as inexhaustible reservoirs, as though their capacity to sustain life could be endlessly appropriated without consequence. I am interested in examining how this logic of extraction inscribes itself upon both bodies and landscapes, exposing the power structures that transform the very conditions of life into commodities.
By bringing together these fragments of everyday experience, the series invites reflection on what quietly sustains the world while remaining largely unacknowledged. I take this condition of invisibility as a point of departure to investigate what has come to be regarded as too ordinary to deserve attention: practices of care and their profound entanglement with water, both indispensable to the continuity of life and, for precisely that reason, persistently treated as resources that are endlessly available.
I am interested in considering how this process of naturalization establishes a parallel between the exploitation of women's bodies and that of the natural world, revealing a shared structure that transforms both care and water into supposedly inexhaustible resources, expected to sustain life indefinitely while obscuring their limits, exhaustion, and the violence to which they are continually subjected.
