During the pandemic, I was one of a group of women from the Department of Design at Goldsmiths who formed the Domestic Monsters, a collective to explore questions and discourses of the domestic through practice.

In those strange times, I remember our online meetings and then in-person and socially distanced meetings being incredibly hopeful, almost the definition of Rebecca Solnit’s urgent work in her book Hope in the Dark. In her article on the book, Solnit writes:

Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. 

The Domestic Monsters felt like both a gift and a power, connecting our everyday domestic lives during the pandemic to our professional lives as designers and researchers; and connecting us to a lineage of women who had similarly drawn on their own lived experience to just make the god-damn work.

These meetings resulted in our first show at the Constance Howard Gallery at Goldsmiths, with all of us contributing work we had made through the pandemic. From the show description:

DOMESTIC MONSTERS examines ways of thinking about what it means to maintain a practice that emerges from and is shaped, inspired and (at times) limited by domestic space and labour. Making this (unfinished/ongoing) work public acknowledges the invisible, ad hoc and responsive infrastructures of support, conversation and ‘thinking together’ that have gently coaxed these monsters into being.

More recently, we have become interested in the mundane textiles of the domestic, specifically the tea towel. So collectively, we gathered references and resources around the history and function of the tea towel, and sketched out a brief.

In thinking on how to approach this brief, I dug around my local ‘everything’ shop of household goods and poked around what I could find online. And then I found a specific tea towel which seemed to echo an Excel spreadsheet, a tool I use every day in my professional life as an academic.

My first act was to design an xlsx spreadsheet in the format of the tea towel, with an idea to use this designed structure to marry data representations of spreadsheets with the structure of tea towels through the act of embroidery.

But then I struck a dead-end — I could not decide what data set I would draw on to construct on my tea towel xlsx sheet. Would it be the history of the gender pay gap? Would it be statistics around the number of women killed by men, as documented by the Femicide Census?

Under the instruction of just making the god-damn work, I decided to first experiment with embroidering text. In hunting around for which text to start with, I revisited some older work and suddenly, with immediate knowledge and understanding, I knew which text it needed to be and that this was the outcome of the project: Pockets of Slime. This work is now called Cleaning Up The Slime.

So I set about designing new tea towels, constructing their design in InDesign and typesetting phrases and sentences from my slimey text on the top of the new grid. I then printed out my experiments and pinned them throughout my studio, living with them every day, to adjust the typesetting.

Whilst I had hoped to hand embroider the tea towels, I soon realised that both my eyesight and my time were protesting. So these tea towels are now with the wonderful digital embroidery service at 1831 Studio. Gabriel is currently producing my slimey tea towels, and has just sent through a trial sew (image below); and I can not wait to hold them in my hands and see them in all their fleshy and slimey being.

I have more plans for them, drawing on this photograph of an American Suffragette from 1917, called Tyranny, by Harris & Ewing in the Harris & Ewing Collection at the Library of Congress. Note the curtain pole which has been used to carry the protest banner …