Tag: kitchen

Susan Frazier, Aprons in The Kitchen, Womanhouse exhibition, 1972

Come in, east…please put on the apron strings and experience the heart of the home with me.

The outside is no longer with you, you are now embraced by my nurturing pink womb, giving life—sustaining milk from my breasts.  The umbilical cord has been cut through, and you must hold on to the apron strings real tight or you might (gasp)…have to rely on yourself…tisk, tisk!

I must work harder to sustain life for you, to meet your biological needs, feed your habits with habits…I am a habit to you!  I am not a habit!  Release me, let me go, you don’t know me, you don’t own me.  I am a human being, not just a source of cheap labor for lazy people.

I want to undo these apron strings, to see what the rest of the world is doing, to see if I can help…to see myself once again.  I want to travel, to see wonders I only dream of daily…to see wonders I only dream of daily, right here in the heart of the home façade.

-Susan Frazier

EGGS TO BREASTS

Vicki Hodgetts

We had a consciousness-raising session on kitchens.  Some people saw kitchens as fulsome, warm, nurturing.  Others saw kitchens as dangerous with hot stoves and sharp knives (“Viciousness in the kitchen—the potatoes hiss”).  I had a fleeting image of fried eggs stenciled over everything—walls, ceiling, floor—and some people saw breasts.  Breasts were nurturing—kitchens were the extension of mothers’ milk.  I felt a little railroaded.  I still wanted eggs.  And then Robin said, “Why not have a transformation from eggs to breasts,” and we were all delighted.  And that’s very important, because although I was the one who finally carried through that aspect of the kitchen (in the main) the idea was really a collective one.  It simply would never have existed if women had not tried to work together.

– Vicki Hodgett

THE KITCHEN

Robin Weltsch

The soft skin of a kitchen pink
Is openers, strainers, blenders
Is cups, pots and hot ovens
Is boxes, cans and glass packages
Is faucets and nippled knobs
A toaster, juicer and waffler
All pink skinned
How would you like your eggs done
this morning?

– Robin Weltsch

“Vicky Hodgett, Susan Frazier and Robin Weltsch’s Nurturant Kitchen featured “Eggs to Breasts”, a pink kitchen with walls covered in breasts, evokes woman as a feeder in the heart of the house. Woman feeds with her kitchen, feeds children with her breasts and feeds man with her body. Culturally propagated stereotypes of womanhood are obsessively repeated in the kitchen – the colour pink and breasts.
Rather than celebrating these feminine attributes, a claustrophobic and surrealist cavern is created, reminiscent of Bourgeois’s grotesque, anthropomorphic body parts, and Yayoi Kusama’s repetitive dot works, which symbolised her decent into madness. The approximation of eggs and breasts also suggest a woman’s reproductive capabilities and thus her primary function, as well as a shortened evolutionary path – from egg (a foetus) to breast (a mother).”

Source: thepastelproject.com