A Woman’s Work is Never Done
A Woman’s Work is Never Done (2025) employs needlework as a tool to examine the historical and social reality of women’s labour. It also speaks to the construction of feminine subjectivities under diffuse patriarchal disciplinary regimes by recontextualising filet crochet patterns historically used to educate women in propriety. By constructing the tapestries out of wire, the works reify the labour required for their own production, undermining the notion that domestic labour is not a form of productive labour. The materiality adds an intensification and new level of difficulty to the making process, in turn, the making itself becomes a performance of endurance. This also serves as an allusion to the experience of women’s labour morphing into one never-ending shift. Between waged work, domestic labour, and social reproduction duties, the saying: “a woman’s work is never done” is embodied.
Gina Corridore’s practise explores dimensions of womanhood and culture through a class-critical lens. She uses needlework to examine histories of women’s domestic labour, and as a form of cultural preservation in the face of dislocation from her family’s ancestral homeland of Italy. She cites research and ideological development as vital to the creation of her artistic work, which then gives tangibility to her conceptual concerns in a mutually informing cycle.
