Vee is a multi-media artist, playwright, painter, and performer. Her resume includes volumes of work as a visual artist, singer-songwriter and short film maker. Her plays have been performed in Short and Sweet Sydney, and her music profiles Ana Key and the Underdogs (Squeeze Records) and Matriarch. She is a graduate of Wollongong University’s Creative Arts Course and since 1987 has sold a number of works through solo and group exhibitions. She has previously run Mamapalooza events in Sydney generating more creativity for mothers in the arts.
Vee, unconventional by nature, portrays the unusual importance of domesticity in her paintings. Having juggled a busy life of going to work, mothering and housework, her ideas on canvas portray a snapshot of ordinary life, but with an absurd tone. There is often a political statement, subtle or wildly over the top. Kitchen sinks, washing baskets, mops, brooms and vacuum cleaners, all taking the limelight and delighting the eye with humour, colour and imagination. But underlying the playful subject matter could be a controversial discourse about housework, the division of labour, and women’s continuing efforts to achieve equality.
“Housework is still overwhelmingly done by women even though many also work like their husbands, and most childcare is still women’s responsibility. The division of housework is politics at play in the home…Housework should be paid work, like all other jobs but, …”housework is considered trivial, playing second fiddle to “paid” work.” The National, 2014
Vee doesn’t see her paintings as being political. She says they are really about the object itself. She finds beauty in the actual object, the mop, the broom or the vacuum cleaner, but she does admit giving status to the object. Her elevation of household items to be seen as greater in themselves, than being taken for granted, is a metaphor for the status of housework, as well as status of women, housewives, and mothers.
Whatever you see in Vee’s work, whether it’s political or not, the images will have a lasting impact.
All enquiries
TAP Gallery. 0400610440
artwork.
