Sawyer Rose
Renée (2019)
wood, brass, silver leaf, silver solder, rope / archival pigment print
120 x 140 x 10 in. / 24 x 36 in.
$24,000
The Carrying Stones Project uses a combination of art and data science to jump-start conversation about women’s work inequity.
In the U.S., women are clocking nearly twice as many unpaid labor hours— housework, caring for children and elders, volunteering— as men. On top of that, consider the gender pay gap, unequal representation of women in leadership positions and in the media, and the additional effects of these inequalities on women of color and those in the LGBTQI+ community.
The large-scale installation sculptures at the core of the project are built using real-life work data collected from a diverse group of female-identifying workers:
1) Project participants record their work hours, paid and unpaid.
2) Next, I translate each woman’s hours into a data visualization sculpture that lets viewers see the vast number of hours each woman logs at her paid job and at her unpaid home or volunteer job.
3) Once a woman’s data sculpture is complete, I take the storytelling a step further by taking a photographic portrait of each woman lifting and carrying her sculpture— bearing the burden of her hours in a real and physical way.
© Sawyer Rose