Ties That Bind

Inspired to explore the “double burden” carried by women who work at paid jobs and are also responsible for domestic labor at home, I debuted The Carrying Stones Project at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture on September 23, 2016.

The Ties That Bind sculpture documents the lives of 47 women who tracked the hours they spend on paid work and unpaid work in a custom web application built for this project. The sculpture is a data visualization of those hours, made of 1000 handmade tiles, each representing an hour of time worked.

The sculpture was assembled in a public interactive event, and selected women from the project participated in a short performance.

Women around the world do more unpaid housework than men – A recent study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the percentage of men and women who are involved in housework has barely moved since 2003, with 84% of women reporting doing 2.6 hours of unpaid housework daily vs. 64% of men who reported doing any housework at all, and those that did spent 2 hours a day. 

performance & interactive event

Ties That Bind debuted at Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture in San Francisco in September 2016 along with a performance and a public assembly event.

The performance was a more theatrical interpretation of the data, featuring 10 women attempting to tie together a day’s worth of work tiles while being interrupted by actors representing different aspects of women’s daily duties, like dealing with a saucy teenager or lending an ear to her aging mother.

Sawyer also felt that her audience would understand the data better if they could interact with it. So, for “Ties That Bind”, everyone who came to the opening got to participate in the actual building of the sculpture. As people tied the tiles together, they were able to directly appreciate the sheer number of labor hours women are working.