Lacey Decker Hawthorne
Portable Spill: Teacup
Silicone, pigment, found object, 30 x 20 x 7 cm.
Portable Spills is a series of flexible, movable, permanent silicone spill sculptures completed during an Artist Residency in Motherhood. Working with the concept of domestic labour as a site of disappearance, these soft sculptures playfully subvert the Sisyphean task of making the messy disappear. Like many new parents, I spend a significant part of each day cleaning up a rainbow of spills from all kinds of silicone baby objects—bibs, bowls, spoons, teethers, cups, toys, soothers. In an inversion of material, these silicone spills are permanent, and can be stacked, draped, folded, wrapped, stretched, and of course, washed. It’s a spill that won’t disappear: a spill that acts as some stubborn evidence for the invisible embodied labour of cleaning up.
Tactus (Red Thread)
Scanned contact print, 22 x 18 cm.
Tactus is the Latin word meaning “sense of touch.” This ongoing series of contact prints are made using a scanner, allowing both my hands and these textile objects to press against the glass, and capture a ghost-like, inexact image.
Clothing, scrap fabric, sewing patterns, thread — these soft objects reference how textiles touch and house our bodies on a daily basis. The gesture of touch is amplified though my handling of cloth, my hands pressed against the glass, and the beam of light that touches both as it records an image through contact.