Emily Babette

     Historically women have been repressed to stay within the private sphere, ‘behind-the-scenes’ so to speak, as the public sphere was initially intended only to be accessible to men. This was true well into the twentieth century, but as women today in the twenty-first century continue to strive for equity and equality, the quest for accessibility is an on-going project. Part of the historic inaccessibility to the public sphere was due to the lack of occupations and opportunities available to women, as women were mostly relegated to the role of caregiver. Caregiver could be taken literally, to denote mother and/or house-wife, but for working-class women caregiver could also denote domestic-mimicking occupations such as housekeepers, cleaners, child-care workers, servers, etc. (i.e. domestic labor).        I will emphasis that this essay is not to be considered an ethnographic sweep of all women , and I go don’t want to come across as deliberately l...

I am writing this post as I am going into my third week of quarantine due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which is sweeping the planet. It feels like a very appropriate time to sit down and share some thoughts and meditations on home.. from home. I have an on going body of work where I explore the concept of home and domestic spaces from a feminist point of view. Additionally, my point of view has been developed from my peripatetic childhood, as I spent my formative years nomadically moving with my family between Canada, Australia, and the US. Typically we would dwell in a place for no longer than one year, and often far less. In 2018 I became a naturalized citizen of the United States, after living in this country for eighteen years under the status of "legal alien." This shift in the legality of my  permission  to dwell here, permanently and as a bonafide citizen with full rights, led me to ask the questions: "Is the United States now my home?"...

A task of the artist is to find a suitable place or locale for one's finished artwork post-completion (if completion even exists). Art can  seem most  at home in the artist's studio where it was made. Yet most artists make work with the intention of bringing it somewhere else to dwell, even if it's only for the length of an exhibition. Interestingly, a descriptive word which stops artists dead in their tracks is the word “decorative.” A word can be no greater abhorred by a majority of visual artists. If a critic or peer describes your work as “decorative,” most of the time this  adjective  is not happily  received.  Curiously, artists who make work to sell in commercial galleries intend for their work to be bought by collectors, which generally means the work will end up “decorating” a wall. What a paradoxical predicament.  Exploring this notion further, I am now led to think of the physical wall in which the art piece is installed. ...