My work depicts the emotional labor of women. Emotional Labor is the work done in the home – physical, emotional and managerial – to keep everyone happy, functioning and successful. This labor is typically unacknowledged and unappreciated. It is an additional second job for many women. A hidden job, a job that consumes our time and our minds.
Emotional Labor is steeped in our generational history; research has shown that there is no generational divide – our mothers, our grandmothers and women today are similarly burdened. It has been so insidious because, until now, it has been so invisible.
My practice aims to transform my lived experience as a woman, a mother, and a wife. I am translating objects into meaning, effort into evidence, the domestic into the political, the home into the public sphere, and emotional labor of women into patriarchal consciousness. My work speaks about my experience. It also speaks about a shared female experience – women carrying the emotional labor of families and, therefore, society.
Leslie Lyman