Essential Labor and The American
“Serve your country, raise chickens.” Public Service Announcement by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, 1861.
In the United States our society has both become the most divisive it has ever been in contemporary politics and has seen the most lucrative fiscal years in modern history within its Jewelry Industry. Currently, media is telling the story of hate and labor is telling the story of love. To tell the story of essential labor back in 2020 is to tell the story of Americans valuing healthcare, teaching, and union skilled labor above other work.
Since the pandemic, the term essential labor is commonly known despite having diminished and devalued a significant part of our population and their contributions to society and our communities. What does being essential look like and feel like in America? How do we cast the role of the construction worker, the nurse, or the high school teacher within our own bias? And where do stereotypes and politics intersect within the populus?
Using signaling and nuanced iconography, materials, and formats like sculpture, utensils, Jewelry, and tools, I generate object rhetoric. I explore the American labor identity and the phenomenon of our collective understanding of essential labor and its inherent contradictions within politics, society, and everyday life. I currently focus on construction, manual and home labor, and the language of tools, machines, utensils and their use. I constantly search for subtlety in creating this visual language through relics of American History and tropes of stereotypical labor identities and gender roles. I do this with functional aesthetics and materials, and sometimes with overt decoration as a signifier of virtue; much like a steamfitter’s meticulous welds on a pipe that will be buried underground, a decorative spoon made of steel serves no purpose but to “spill” and show itself off before it’s plunged into a pot. Or like virtuously decorative steel brackets holding up a wall just to be covered with drywall and forgotten.
In my most recent work, conflict and relationships begin to reveal themselves when seen through the lens of American history and current American stereotypes. Material becomes the ultimate signifier and transformation through scale and engagement with the body alters and skews its interpretation. I flip from steel and stainless steel to sterling silver and back, perhaps destined to be wearable. But ultimately somehow, a simple image of an eagle becomes painfully and obviously derivative and appropriated from historically American indigenous cultures when made into jewelry, but iconically ’Merican when painted on the back of a dump truck or printed on money. Coincidentally, by using material specificity, I explore how American iconography is a coopted and stolen visual language that can always be packaged as the Melting Pot paradox.
I investigate how materials (like steel) or sites (like the garden) can signify gender through the analysis of labor’s assigned roles. Perceptions of ownership in labor, gender, and political roles leads to divisive rhetoric so, perhaps object rhetoric can alter those perceptions by creating room for interpretation. Clearly, serving your country in 1861 wasn’t only for men going to war, but also for women sustaining their family by raising chickens.