Dreams Of An Everyday Housewife
by Stacey Guthrie
by Stacey Guthrie
We're bombarded daily by images and adverts related to housework and domesticity. In the main these images present a fantasy of order and comfort. The work interrogates the line/border between that fantasy and the reality of the life of an 'everyday housewife'.
The bulk of responsibility for domestic order still mainly falls to women and advertisers, manufacturers and magazine publishers capitalise on that. They take our daily chores, sex them up and sell them back to us as a fantasy. In excruciatingly expensive 'ideal homes' magazines we are presented with clinically clean, minimalist show-houses where the only evidence of human habitation is a designer mug of coffee on a pristine worktop or a perfectly arranged fruit bowl or the makings of an elegant lunch, made from rustic, artisanal produce. It is as if the people in the photo have reached such domestic perfection that they've been ascended to heaven. That is the fantasy we're being sold. An ascension to a perfect future where there's no stack of dirty dishes, no kids' coats strewn across the floor, no cat running out the door after being sick under the kitchen table.
Dreams of an Everyday Housewife sits right at the border between the reality and the fantasy; displaying the friction caused by the expectation that the fantasy can be attained by buying the right products and appliances and the reality that no matter how many appliances or retro disinfectants you buy (yes, Zoflora, you let me down) housework is still endless drudgery and you aren't going to be ascended to ideal home heaven anytime soon.
11 items of artwork shown.