Domesticity: Feminist Art and the Idea of the Home

Feminism itself has changed dramatically from women’s liberation of the late 1960s to today’s third wave. Helena Reckitt discusses work by women artists from the heyday of the women’s movement to contemporary times through the filter of domesticity. Asking how women artists have responded to the home as both a site of constraint and a source of rich, previously taboo imagery, Reckitt traces changing attitudes to domestic space, labor, materials, and iconography. The lecture was organised in tandem with a solo exhibition by Michelle Grabner exploring domesticity and exemplifying a new examination of the feminine in contemporary art.