“His Mom Told Him To….”

Artist Statement of Audya Amalia’s work for 6th Bandung Contemporary Art Award

For the last two years, I have an intimate feeling with crochet technique for the cretive process, which is always associated with domestic work and women. These keywords bring me to interpret more about this household work issues, which is always identical with women in the family. In 2007, my work titled Domestic Goddess #1 is the beginning to communicate my nerves to the sight of a girl needs to do all the household work at home, and it is started between my mother and me. It revealed the context of ‘domestic work’ through the apron form –as clothing that is often worn when doing work at home such as cooking– which is made longer than general design with crochet patterns that are made unfinished, representing a point of view on domestic work bonds that are generally lowered by the mother of her daughter from time to time until no one knows when it will be end.

Domestic Goddess #1

Crocheted copper wire

Variable dimentions

2017

I always felt that the work was never finished and would continue to develop into other forms and ideas that were related to my view of being a daugther to a mother. So in this work which called His Mom Told Him To…. I make a dialogical apprach, based on a process which consisting of male participants who randomly invited through meets and shares as a catalyst to push my curiosity about men’s point of view about their mother in the domestic area or home. This work offers a space for interaction between each male participant to continue the crochet by Domestic Goddess #1 while sharing stories related to views of each other’s mother in our position as children, life, conflict, and recollections about mothers.

Through a copper wire crocheted by male participants, this work intends to convey another language to bend the tradition of taking care of work at home not only as a women’s obligation but also a responsibility for men. Surprisingly, the exchange process between the participant and I gave the value of awareness on a simple scale to the various educational patterns adopted by a mother at home to be an aspect in a certain role that affected through the male participants’ character to adulthood.