MAYDAY

BOOK OF WOMEN by Tao Aimin

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BOOK OF WOMEN NO. 1 (2006)

Chinese calligraphy on used wooden washboards, jute cord
The artist has collected thousands of washboards over the years, recording the stories and faces of the rural women whose hands wore these boards down through the recursive repetition of monotonous labor. Each board is distinct. The patterns of wear on the boards over decades of daily use are testimonies to the passage of time, the passage of the lives spent, day in and day out serving hearth and home. For many of the women who used these boards, they are among the only records left of their lives. There are often no photographs, and without literacy, there can be no diaries or letters to attest to the lives of these women. Relegated to what Hannah Arendt followed ancient Greeks in calling the oikos — the household sphere of private, bodily necessity, which they contrasted with public life, thought, action and freedom — it might seem as if these women were as invisible as their life stories. Yet the material culture of manual labor has endured for millennia, and these washboards bear witness to the infinitesimal, and yet, profound and sustaining ways in which this mundane, quotidian labor that occupied most of their existences, inscribed their beings into the world.
BOOK OF WOMEN NO. 2 (2006)

Chinese calligraphy on used wooden washboards, jute cord

Return to table of contents for PRACTICES, POWER & THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Return to table of contents for Issue 2 Winter 2010

Filed Under: Art

Further Reading

Explorations in Friendship & Witchcraft in The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
by Aya Kusch

Long before Sephora started selling “Starter Witch Kits” and books with titles like Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive became mainstream, the Mexican-British surrealist painter, Leonora Carrington, was conjuring her own magical realms with the help of paint and the written word.  Her wild life was marked by adventure, rebellion, and an irrepressible desire to create. […]

LOVERS IN WINTER by Steven Klepetar

You can tell they are saying goodbye that distance has already swallowed them up, by the way they linger on this cold beach, bare feet stung by the rag end of waves.  She is weeping and he would if he could.  The wind must sound lonely to them and the hungry gulls a provocation about […]

SIBLINGS (FLIGHT FROM REGAN NATIONAL, WASHINGTON, D. C.) by Michelle Askin

You would have thought it was my sister who tried to die— not waking when the blood urine on my legs wet her beauty. Not waking until the nurse’s off the bed, you can stay but no sleeping together. Separating us as though we never floated in the same womb like bright specs from a lighthouse explosion. […]

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