Vanessa Marr, now Principal Lecturer at the university, started her successful Domestic Dusters project following her study on the renowned MA Sequential Design & Illustration 2012-14. She wrote poetry and embroidered a collection of dusters commenting upon the expectations of women within a domestic environment. Popular fairy tale phrases were juxtaposed against definitions of domesticity, brutality, protectiveness and femininity, questioning the promises told through fairy tales to women and girls. Determined that the work didn’t end there, and keen to include other perspectives, she transformed her MA work into a long-standing practice-based research project.
Since then the project has gone from strength to strength as a collaborative arts and practice-based research project explores contemporary perspectives on the everyday lives of women. Participants are invited through an open call to embroider their domestic thoughts, feelings, complaints, and celebrations as words or images onto a yellow duster. Each duster is unique and hand-stitched, transforming it from a cleaning cloth into a voice for women today. They have been stitched by women across the world, proclaiming a multitude of opinions as act of craftivism (craft and activism) that invites conversations and challenges the legacy of so-called women’s work.
It has been running since 2014 with an ever-growing exhibiting collection of over 700 dusters. It has been exhibited and presented widely in both creative and academic contexts, including the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, the Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft, Loughborough, Bedfordshire and Brighton Universities, and venues such as Excel London, and Alexandra Palace for the Knitting & Stitching Show. It has also travelled to mainland Europe and Florida USA.
Vanessa also uses the project to work in collaboration with charities who support women those voices are silenced or unheard, utilizing the duster to address issues such as domestic violence, homelessness, unpaid care, and domestic displacement. An excellent example of this is just last week (24th October 2023) when Vanessa worked in collaboration with the charities Oxfam and We Care to display dusters calling for the rights of unpaid carers at the Senedd (Welsh Parliament) in Cardiff, Wales. This research was also funded by the University of Brighton’s Impact Acceleration Account.
For more information visit: https://domesticdusters.wordpress.com
To find out more about MA Sequential Design & Illustration visit: https://www.brighton.ac.uk/courses/study/sequential-design-illustration-ma.aspx
