Silent Language
Silent Language was an international exhibition at Yorkshire Artspace bringing together artists from the UK and China. Through jewellery, material practice and participatory making, the exhibition explored women’s lived experience, using making as a means of connection, exchange and storytelling. Devised and curated by Maria Hanson, Xinru Dai, Yusi Wang and Yuxiao Zhu. 20 artists took part in the project.
The Angel and the Housekeeper began with Virginia Woolf’s The Mark on the Wall and a question that remained: what kinds of thought become possible when attention is allowed to wander?
A bar of soap, a scrubber, a sink strainer. Objects that carry the traces of invisible labour and the quiet repetitions of care – things that remember the lives that have passed through them. In the studio, these domestic companions meet another kind of companion: the machine. A small programmable display, handwritten notes, drawings and found objects gather together, to think alongside Woolf’s works. The machine becomes another reader of the text, another observer of the room, another participant in the slow work of noticing and leaving alone.
The title borrows from Woolf’s image of the Angel in the House and places her beside the housekeeper. Between them lies a lifetime of expectation, maintenance and thought.
The power resides in the pocket.
I think of this work as an act of sustained looking. The mark on the wall is never only a mark. It is an invitation to pause long enough for the mind to wander, to resist certainty, and to discover that even the smallest domestic moment can contain an entire world.
Emotional Scrubber speaks to the invisible work of holding a household together, recognising that emotional and cognitive labour can be more demanding and abrasive than the physical work it accompanies.
