With painstaking embroidery on her skin, British artist Eliza Bennett hopes to challenge the preconceived notion that ‘women’s work’ is light and easy!
So you must have seen intricate embroideries on textiles. Now sample this. British artist Eliza Bennett uses her own hand as a canvas to stitch embroideries. She uses the top layer of her skin to create colourful artworks. She is doing it as a part of her series titled A Woman’s Work is Never Done. The objective is to highlight the hard work involved in ‘easy female jobs’. She explains, “By using the technique of embroidery, which is traditionally employed to represent femininity and applying it to the expression of its opposite, I hope to challenge the pre-conceived notion that ‘women’s work’ is light and easy. Aiming to represent the effects of hard work arising from employment in low paid ‘ancillary’ jobs, such as cleaning, caring and catering, all traditionally considered to be ‘women’s work’.”
She says some viewers consider the piece to be a feminist protest but for her, it’s about “human value”. “After all, there are many men employed in caring, catering, cleaning etc… all jobs traditionally considered to be ‘women’s work’. Such work is invisible in the larger society, with ‘A woman’s work’ I aim to represent it,” she says.
She first tried the trick under a table during a home economics class in school. “I was totally amazed to find that I could pass a needle under the top layers of skin without any pain, only a mild discomfort. As with many childhood whims it passed and I hadn’t thought any more about it until quite recently when I decided to apply the process to my hand to make it appear calloused and work worn like that of a manual labourer,” she says.
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