“The Weight of Women, was birthed while sitting on the razor’s edge of feeling like I had it all and at that same moment realizing it’s all too much to carry at one time. I was brought up to believe that I could have it all if I just work hard enough, look and behave the right way, buy the right products, have the right attitude.

It’s too much.

My way of articulating “too much” is partly by gathering and appropriating found objects and forming “packs”. We as humans are sentimental, memory-making creatures. Thus, we tend to imbue objects with meaning.
By combining these things in a new context, I hope to shift the viewer’s perspective around the meaning of the objects I’ve assembled. For example, altering a wedding dress to act as both a symbolic and literal foundation to support the weight of objects I’ve gathered that, for me, represent the many responsibilities expected of married women.

But I’m also a painter.
There are two large oil paintings in this show. I used both scale and color to add support to the form. The scale of my paintings is always relative to the size of the human body; scale being a voice in the cacophony that is our cultural visual language.

As an artist, I’m very interested in breaking down the barriers between artist and viewer. To that end my work is participatory: both in its fabrication and in the final viewing. I want people to be able to touch the work, to try it on, to add a bit of their energy to the work. I want anyone who stands in the same space as my art to be an active part of the relationship between artist and audience.

I’m also interested how women choose to, or are expected to spend their life’s hours. So much of how women spend their days is “unseen” labor. For this show, the time it took me to gather, clean and sterilize each eggshell was approximately 50 hours, and it would take less than 5 minutes for someone to trample them into dust. The hours it takes to work, shop, make ourselves “pretty”, exercise, cook, clean, tend to our children and our husbands...all with little or no rest before we start the cycle all over again feels akin to washing eggshells.

Both feel a little like Sisyphus, except I don’t think of this “unseen” labor as a punishment. I believe it needs to be a choice women are allowed to make. And seeing the “unseen” is the first step to be able to make that choice.”

Gabrielle B. McLean