one thread many loops: mieke van den berg
9 Nov 2024 to 2 feb 2025
One Thread Many Loops: The encoded materiality of home.
Round and round in circles making invisible labour visible. By Mieke van den Berg.
Artist Statement
One Thread Many Loops unpacks domestic life as a mother, as artist Mieke van den Berg develops a personal language around conceptual art-making, with home as the intimate site. The connecting red thread symbolises human existence, fate, time, and domesticity, and relates to lineage, interconnections within society, anger and power. The wool represents the thread of time connected to the artists’ childhood memories. The to-do lists are the framework of archiving; an act of valuing the mental and invisible labour embedded in these notes. Through the accumulative, time-consuming and repetitive methods of crochet and stitching, Mieke examines new perspectives, uncovering unrivalled relationships between the invisible labour in the home, and drawing parallels in the masculine art world.
Critical to this work is the artist’s experience of making the works ‘Housework’ and ‘Embodied Labour’ in the domestic setting of her living room. Resembling the monotonous duties performed by women in the household, Mieke examines the significance of women’s craft-making as a subversive and empowered feminist contemporary art practice, validating women’s work, and reflecting on the burden of invisible labour. Throughout, the auto-ethnographic and archival processes reveal parallels between household duties and the expectation for women to donate their time to the art world.
Influenced by Marxist Feminist Anarchic theories, these textile craft works- based on traditionally feminine domestic craft- subvert the hierarchy of the arts and the sexual categories of male and female. Marxism theories shaped the artist’s understanding of capitalist and gender-biased structures in the art world and influenced her art practice. One Thread Many Loops is a personal Marxist take on second-wave feminism expressed through the auto-ethnographic craft-making methodology to subvert the patriarchal society.
By displaying the auto-ethnographic archival process of these installations in the gallery, the physical and emotional endurance captured within the creative process of repetitive making validates women’s work and reflects the burden of invisible labour. Making invisible labour visible pays respect to Mieke’s foremothers who have laboured in silence.
Exhibition Events
Mieke van den Berg
Australian-based Dutch-born visual artist Mieke van den Berg currently explores anarchic feminist theories through textile craft works based on traditionally feminine domestic craft. Her practice engages with accumulative, time-consuming and repetitive processes where domestic materials and textiles carry metaphors and build layers of meaning, acknowledging mundane household duties. Mieke subverts the hierarchy of the arts and the sexual categories of male and female. She approaches textile craft making from new perspectives uncovering unrivalled relationships between the invisible labour in the home and drawing parallels in the masculine art world.
Originally a mural artist, Mieke extends her twenty-five-year experience painting large walls with sculptures, installations and performances. During seven years of research, Mieke has seen her work evolve from figurative to conceptual – consisting of layers filled with meaning and metaphors using found objects and materials.
Exhibitions, Arts Awards and residencies: in 2021, Mieke had a solo exhibition, In-Between: [Re]Winding Life’s Thread, at the Old Ambulance Station in Nambour. She was a Finalist in the Lyn McCrea memorial drawing prize 2020 and an excellence award winner of the Local Artist – Local Content Art Prize 2020 at the Caloundra Regional Gallery. In 2019 she was an artist in residence at Draw to Perform, Brighton in the UK.
Main Image: Mieke van den Berg, Embodied Labour (detail). Courtesy of the artist.