Journey's of a Laundry Mountain

In my materially embedded art practice, I reflect on practical and ethical problems of working as an artist in the context of the immediate physical and political environment. My presentation will centre around my film Journeys of a Laundry Mountain (2021). Filmed immediately after the 2020/21 Australian forest fires and just before and during the Covid 19 pandemic, the precariousness of our domestic habits told through global crises is at the heart of the film. My exploration of white patriarchy and colonialism is made personal in approaching the subject through my gendered responsibility as an artist mother for the domestic laundry, whilst recognising my own privileges and ethical entanglements in terms of the gentrification of the area where I live in South East London; my parents’ emigration to Australia, and the ongoing cultural impositions on the indigenous culture and landscape there - highlighted urgently by the practical problems faced ecologically after the fires; paralleled with the coronavirus, and its origins in our encroachment on and abuse of wild territories. My presentation will reflect on whether and how the world has changed since the film was made three years ago, with attention to recent texts by Jack Halberstam, Chantal Mouffe and Donna Haraway. I will explore whether the legacy of the pandemic should be to stop trying to artificially separate ourselves from the very environment we have exploited and encroached on, and to rethink our approach.