Work – Private and or Public

“Private and/or Public”
Soft sculpture 2021

Can we be aware of the line between private and public activity in our lives? Is that harder if the subject is the one who creates? Weaving in her room, did my grandmother ever think that by creating that piece of material on the loom, her life would go from a private to a public one (inaccessible to her at the time)? By transposing a piece of textile that I weave by hand into an object titled installation in space, I break through the thin line between the private and the public. I make the soft structure of the fabric stop, freezing it, making it hard as stone, so that the outside view can feel how it slides under my fingers, rounded and tender. The production of material on the loom is a very intimate physical moment in which energy moves harmoniously through our body and by repeating the same procedures produces a rhythmic sound with which thoughts relax. The procedure can be viewed as meditative, cathartic, but very private and intimate. Observed throughout history, weaving has been the product of those who spend most of their time at home, who take care of the family and mostly women’s work. For a long time, it had the characteristic of decorative art, the one that is less valuable compared to the art produced by the big names in art history, done mostly by the male gender. As a craft or decorative art, weaving remained in the intimate zone. With its softness, colors, seductive charm, we read it as a woman’s energy. When I shape such energy and publicly present it into an object, it becomes a political act. It suggests a vague line of her private and public actions, a life full of content and obligations, a departure from flexibility, and as such contextualized through an artistic act. The contemporary artist is in a very confusing situation today. Their lives are permeated with ambiguity about profession, private life and acting in both. It is very difficult as an artist to be constantly flexible and to continue with many different activities we do. In Bojana Kunst’s book “Artist at Work”, the author sets a modern artist as a prototype of modern flexibility and precarious work. It is precisely the absence of lines between the personal and the public that makes a work of art so close to the creation of life itself. Bojana Kunst further states: “Today, the vanishing dividing line between life and work, placed by many twentieth-century artists at the core of their emancipation tendencies is also at the center of the capitalist processes of life exploitation. It often seems that the artist is the ideal worker in contemporary capitalism; it is also no coincidence that the artistic lifestyle and exploitation of life as an endless creative process underlies the speculation on the future value of art.”