A Woman’s Work is Never Done

“A Woman's Work is Never Done” invites the viewer to look more closely at the lives of several famous (and infamous) women, to see beyond what we think we know about them and peer into the stories hiding behind the headlines. The series consists of fabric and paper collage portraits of headline-grabbing women like Lizzie Borden, Saint Bernadette, Typhoid Mary, Ethel Rosenberg, and the Dionne Quintuplets. Some of these women were hailed as heroes, some became famous as perpetrators of shameful deeds like murder and espionage, others were victims of violence and kidnap, and still others were celebrated merely by an accident of their birth. These women and their stories were embedded in profoundly different historical and cultural contexts, but all were subjects of public fascination whose images were widely disseminated in their own day and continue to be shared and re-shared in the era of the internet. “A Woman’s Work is Never Done” recreates famous newspaper and magazine images of these women using scraps of discarded fabric and paper that I’ve torn and cut into small pieces and then layered and glued down. By re-making images of these famous women using insignificant scraps that might be found in a sewing bag or trash can, I draw attention to the many layers and fragments of the women’s public experiences and the many layers that form our notions of what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable women’s work. The uniformity of materials and size (all portraits are made with scraps from the same vintage dictionary and are 18x24 inches) encourages viewers to look for the similarities in how these disparate women have been perceived and often misunderstood.