women’s work visualized
Women's unpaid labor is one of the most thoroughly documented inequities in the world, and one of the least felt. For nine years, The Carrying Stones Project has been converting women's invisible labor data into something you can see and feel, combining sculpture, portraiture, data visualization, and storytelling to close that gap.
I build large-scale data sculptures that translate women's work into physical form. Each piece profiles a different woman who tracks her paid and unpaid hours for about three weeks using a custom timekeeping app I developed, logging everything: paid work, childcare, eldercare, housework, volunteer time. Each of her hours becomes a physical marker, and I build them into a sculpture that makes the paid/unpaid division of labor immediately obvious.
When the sculpture is finished, I bring it back to the woman whose data built it and photograph her carrying it, literally shouldering her burden of hours. This is where the project becomes most expressive, where you see that there is a real person and a real life behind the numbers.
The works profile women-identifying people across lines of age, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, occupation, and socioeconomic status. I also choose participants whose stories speak to broader patterns in women's labor, from academia and entrepreneurship to film and TV to same-sex relationships.
Activism requires an audience, but you can't build a movement around work that no one can see. Gendered labor inequity has always had this problem. The imbalanced part of women's labor loads is the work society has decided not to count, and those uncounted hours women spend holding everything together go undocumented and largely unnoticed.
When a woman carries her sculpture through the frame, she is carrying the documented hours of her actual life, and for the first time, we can all see the weight of it. These sculptures and portraits are the activist act, proof that the work this woman does is real, that she deserves to be seen, and that seen work is the first step toward respected work.