February 2025
Homestudio-lab
Our Vision
Home Studio Lab utilizes domestic arts to interrogate and redress harm in the context of current discourse on societal inequities and planetary threats. The extractive model of capitalism drives climate chaos, and corrodes human values of relatedness. Domestic arts connote the intimate, narrow field of women’s traditional gender roles that sequester them from the public realm. Unlike avant-garde and studio art, the meanings and associations of domestic arts devalue home as the site of women’s work. Revaluing these arts provides a regenerative way to practice for a more just future. Domestic arts have the potential to provide opportunities for reflection and change in our society’s nascent awareness of white privilege, elitism, and environmental crisis. Their lowly status provides a non-threatening encounter in which to examine thoughts, feelings and beliefs regarding one’s values and actions, while destabilizing the rigid defenses associated with the privacy and isolation of home. Apart from the oppressive uses of domestic arts as production of dowry goods, as preparation for the servitude of traditional marriage, and as markers of accomplishment in achieving or consolidating class status, domestic arts also served and continue to serve as expressions of beauty, mastery, economy, resourcefulness, and solidarity. They provide and embody the social and spiritual well-being inherent in making, creating, caring for family, garden and green space, and community, and working together (as in quilting.)
Home Studio Lab gives precedence to social practice, relationships, and reciprocity over the claims of individual artistic achievement. Before capitalism and in some land-based cultures today, art was and is an integral part of culture, interwoven with everything else, not a separate, esoteric pursuit.
Home Studio Lab repositions the exploration of healing through domestic arts in the public realm, bringing together friends, acquaintances, artists, crafters, writers, community activists, and community members to create projects that combine handwork with social practice and theory. Our projects encourage appreciation of shared and anonymous cultural and political endeavors, to create critical awareness of, and dialogue on, oppressive beliefs and social systems. Home Studio Lab works to enlarge the field designated ‘art’ and expand the community of artists beyond its current class-bound limits, nurturing the practice of resistance across lines of class, gender and race.
Home Studio Lab extends the relational basis of domestic arts to encompass human and ecosystem communities and the planet as a whole, using research and documentation to inspire collective awareness and active concern. Chosen projects expand the context from household to community, seeding horizontal collaborations between neighbors, students and non-profit organizations, and fostering change through citizen research and action using an original teaching tool called the Implosion. Home Studio Lab’s Trash Academy is implementing a city-wide Implosion to address the blight of legacy dump sites in low-income neighborhoods, channeling community members’ knowledge and ideas to influence City policies.
Home Studio Lab holds a strong focus on mending and repair, both on the physical and metaphoric level. One current Implosion project explores the social and environmental costs associated with discarded blue jeans. Careful, sturdy repair using visible mending can add many years to the life of a pair of jeans while creating an aesthetic that values imperfection, uniqueness, and the handmade touch. Home Studio Lab combines Sashiko mending with a strong dash of Pennsylvania Dutch handwork traditions to revive treasured garments for barter, sidestepping the monetization of the mend and emphasizing its role as a reciprocal gift. Reinvigorating old clothing by using non-toxic plant dyes can also add years of life to a garment instead of sending it into the waste stream. Teaching natural dyeing techniques serves as another avenue for raising awareness of the issues of textile waste and toxic production processes. A related arena of exploration is the importance of native plants to sustaining fragile urban and suburban ecosystems. Home Studio Lab has documented the transformation of an urban garden over decades of care and regeneration, through ink drawings of plants going to seed, dead plants, chaotic plants, and layering multiple plants on a single drawing. The ornamental garden of Western culture is like a dead garden whose esthetics are dictated by capitalism. It doesn't support the life of native bugs, bees, bats, birds, and other wildlife. Its neatness and prettiness should be replaced with an esthetic of wild messiness and an acceptance of a lively chaos that includes death and the seeds of the next season’s growth.
Home Studio Lab projects explore the historic uses of domestic arts and discover creative applications and juxtapositions of traditional crafts that lead us to reconsider their value and significance, and provide opportunities for communities to define themselves, clarify their values, and act in solidarity to promote social justice.