Woman of the House is a meditation on the act of sacrificing one’s sense of self in the creation of a notion of home. The work is an ode to my grandmother, and other such women around me, whom I have seen spending their lives reinforcing the confines of a home that slowly erodes their identity.
Here the fraying self is represented by plaster casts of a face and my fingers. These plaster sculptures have been used to draw designs, referential of kolam drawings, on random pieces of construction material like concrete slabs and bricks. Kolam is a design made with rice flour at the entrance of homes for bringing prosperity and is mostly done by women every morning in traditional Hindu households in South India. My kolam here unifies individual pieces of a place to make a home; and by using the plaster to draw this pattern, the sculpture and thus the self are spent in the creation of these designs and an ideal notion of home.
The work is inspired mostly by my grandmother, who has been a homemaker for over 50 years, and her struggles with depression. I have seen over the years how the boundaries of patriarchy, gender roles, tradition, and so on are built up around women like my grandmother. With no one lending a hand for them to step out, their sense of purpose narrows down to the maintenance of these very boundaries. Their identity becomes the tethering of a home that they built; putting their love, energy, and very self into it. However, not many of them receive any acknowledgement or support for this act of nurturing. I now pay homage to this nurturing that I have so often seen turned into a relentless sacrifice, wondering how long a woman can keep spending themselves drawing these patterns of home.
