Laundry/Ecstasy Project Description

Laundry/Ecstasy is a performance in the former laundry room of the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in Washington, DC. For eight hours I ironed family linens that have passed through the hands of five generations of women: a meditation on the relationship of domestic and spiritual labor, and a feminist inquiry into ritual, gender, and power.

In the video a patch of sunlight moves across the wall as tolling church bells mark the passage of time. I steamed and pressed inherited bedsheets and hand-embroidered textiles for the length of an average workday, symbolically airing my dirty laundry and keeping silent to acknowledge the often-unrecorded history of ‘women’s work’.

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. A paradox of domestic work is that while one’s body is confined to a physical space, one’s mind is free to roam without boundary.

This all-male Catholic monastery is part of a larger Western European system that for centuries has relied on unpaid labor from female communities. By performing on these grounds, I aim to provoke reflection on unspoken expectations and power: which repetitive behaviors lull us into maintaining the status quo; what gender roles support our domestic and economic structures; who benefits from institutions that undervalue female labor and agency?