“Show your work” is an exploration of indirect self-harm and its relationship with labour within the larger context of our society’s understanding of the correlation between ‘hard work’ and visible representations of pain. We the collective tend to be quicker to legitimize work that produces visual indicators of pain in the labourer. Worn knees, bad backs and ripped-apart hands are symbols that we tend to associate with proof of hard, legitimate, most often traditionally ‘masculine’ work. The tendency to assign visual pain as an indicator of the legitimacy of work pushes many people, especially feminine people, to perform pain as a way of seeking validation that our work is legitimate, valid and/or respected.
I used scans of my own hands in the creation of this series and I focused in on sewing to serve as a piece of traditionally feminine labour. My choices of surface were initially sewing patterns treated to loosely mimic skin, but because of their texture the final print layer wasn’t all the way visible so I opted to also work with fabric. Both choices were made to further integrate the piece into the language of sewing. The practice of sewing is meant to be integrated visually into the figure as well. I did this by using a thread and needle to directly sew into a stencil piece in a pattern that is meant to mimic the lay-out of major veins and arteries in our hands. I then took that sewn element and roughed it up a bit, taking a seam ripper to major sections like the fingertips and other areas of common wear. I then printed a drawing of the ‘left at the scene’ seam ripper onto the surface which was meant to bridge the gap between the figure and the action we see having been taken in the image.
