Laundry/Ecstasy is an installation and eight hour performance set in the former laundry room of the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in Washington DC, 2021

Laundry/Ecstasy
Installation and performance
Iron, family linens, ironing board, cane basket
Monastery of the Holy Land in America, Washington, DC
2021

Laundry/Ecstasy is an installation and eight hour performance set in the former laundry room of the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in Washington DC. In a religious house, a complex site of spiritual practice, daily labor, intellectual freedom and sometimes oppressive structure, I repeatedly ironed linens from five generations of women in my family. Beginning in at dawn I pressed and folded hand-embroidered cloth for the length of a workday, taking two 15-minute breaks and one lunch break in accordance with state labor laws. A video documents the passing of time in a patch of sunlight moving across the wall and the hourly tolling of church bells. Viewers are invited to see but not enter this cloistered space, to witness physical movements and metaphysical labors that point to the interiority of spiritual experience and the often-unrecorded history of domestic work.