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The Chair
Core Themes
Domestic pressure, societal scrutiny, the human cost of political participation, systemic barriers to entry.
Artist Statement
The chair stands as both invitation and accusation. It carries ambition but also expectation. Placed in a space where the personal and political can’t be separated. Here, success is measured against things no one says out loud. How present you are at home, how well you care for your family, how well behaved you are. Success calculated in ways never demanded of men. Leadership, then, is no longer about capability. It becomes a question of whether you are allowed to belong.
“She can’t even feed her own children. How is she going to serve an island? … No man on this council was ever asked who was feeding his children.”
Concept Breakdown
A chair sits atop a shattered tiled floor, a fractured domestic space, surrounded by scattered kitchen plates and children’s toys. The chair bears a price tag whose “cost” is not monetary but human: discrimination, lack of family support, societal and domestic pressure, defamation, and online bullying. The installation embodies the questions female politicians are forced to endure but their male counterparts rarely face, such as “Who is feeding your children?” and “Why is she so selfish?”.
Additional tags displayed alongside the chair draw from client-provided datasets, presenting statistics on women’s access to education, the lack of sponsorship funding for female politicians, and the systemic barriers designed to discourage women from entering politics. This turns the piece into both an artistic statement and an educational tool. A final layer is added through projection mapping onto the chair itself, with text that reinforces and deepens the themes of the work.