STRIFE - Claudia Rose & Kate O'Neill

About

Presenting STRIFE, a debut duo exhibition by Kate O’Neill and Claudia Rose that negotiates the domiciliary through a sculptural intersection of two didactic practices. O’Neill and Rose compose sculptural environments that insist feminised handicrafts are matters of generational and societal resistance. Utilising contemporary materiality to renegotiate and fabricate the domestic space. Setting a new dialogue amid socio-feminist narratives, forces the viewer into a perspective of involuntary voyeurism of the private sphere.

Influenced by feminist anthropological concerns, O’Neill and Rose intrude and undermine the domestic space. Anthropology which studies the theory of women, gender and feminist identity puts forward woman – as self, as other, as being, as individual. By the simple act of “re-authoring the work as by a woman” (Brice 2018), breaks down masculine-feminine archetypes. Generating a significant shift of power to identity, and power to visualisation, in the realms of artist to woman, to woman as maker.

STRIFE exhibits interpretations of woman as maker – upon home and craft – as a liminal space that commends the history of and immortalises it within materiality. This pseudo-monument to feminist legacies enables continuous dialogues and scrutiny of gender inequities in society. O’Neill and Rose demonstrate a brutal fragility in their artworks to demonstrate the “freeze, appease, mend, tend, befriend” (Williams 2016) response women exhibit to danger. The limitation on female freedom continues to validate evident societal male privilege.

Within the exhibition, the mummification of an undisclosed presence and the suffocation of the feminine, is visualised by absence – of self and of body. However as theorised by Drew Leder (1990) the spectators’ body is integral to experience of environment. The contemporary materiality is the nexus of what is perceived and what is experienced.

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O’Neill and Rose manipulate tactile and visual perception, familiar objects in unnatural materials, evoking uncertainty. The absence created by O’Neill and Rose is alien to self, uncontrollable to body, obscured by the desire to attribute recognition and forgotten to others. O’Neill and Rose fashion an exhibition appeasing theoretic concerns: the exploration of domestic as an obscene identity – in which the feminine self is beyond patriarchal control. The dichotomy of a materialistically transient and functionally precarious installation awakens potential for physical and emotional responses. In the continuous threat to defy classification, the stereotypical gender roles i.e. women toward private spheres, men toward public spheres, a question is posed – how is conformity eradicated, if we are not allowed to embrace it?

O’Neill and Rose visual retort is to expose the hand of the artist. In a culture of technology, mass production and instantaneous gratification, the presentation of traditional handiwork – in form, texture, and space – performs metaphorically to illuminate without emphasising socio-cultural or socio-political agendas.  Strife (noun) is defined as (to have) an angry or bittersweet disagreement over fundamental issues or conflict. Kate O’Neill and Claudia Rose represent the definition through an act of rebellion on the domiciliary