Sheltering Who?
Sheltering Who? is about two contrasting types of shelter.
Men Aground describes current facts about government-led housing and climate change policy choices, and their results.
Women Afloat imagines and revalues shelter in our climate-challenged future from a womanly perspective.
Men Aground
This piece explores the impact of policy choices made by institutions which operate in a patriarchal framework, weaving ever stronger their pin-striped social “fabric”. These social structure and policy choices have disastrous consequences for the health and livelihoods of so many of our community members. Yet they are defended fiercely as economically necessary and prudent by the men who are in charge of making them despite the fact they do not experience their deprivations. These policy choices treat our ecosystem as a resource for private exploitation, our social structure as a framework to enable and support violence and exploitation of women’s bodies and labour, and use climate change as a battleground for power and privilege.
From left to right, in the image above:
Men in Charge of Town Planning and Nation Building.
Result: “Postcode poverty” created by policies that reinforce structural disadvantage across postcodes within large cities, as well as between cities, and rural and regional areas.
Men in Charge of Housing Policy.
Result: 116,000 people homeless each night.
Men in Charge of Marriage as a Relationship Structure.
Result: median marriage lasts 8.4 years.
Men in Charge of a Home as a Shelter.
Results: 1 woman killed by her intimate partner every 10 days; 1 in 5 women over 15 experience physical violence; most common reason women and children experience homelessness is having to flee from domestic violence.
Men in Charge of Climate Catastrophe Decisions.
Result: 7 of 111 COP27 key speakers were female, even though women and girls are disproportionately impacted by climate change.
Women Afloat
This piece envisions a womanly response to global climate catastrophe. Released from the maps, fences and roles that belonged to the old way of life, women take to the rising waters, using the power of collaboration with wind and tides to navigate to a new way of living in harmony with the natural world. While women prepare, gather, protect, learn and adapt, men continue to insist on being in charge of responses that exploit, exclude and evade,
In this flotilla formation, the wisdom of the elder women to gather and protect that which nourishes and sustains life is prioritised They use the strength and hope of the younger women to see far ahead and steer towards hope. They hold all that is precious, healing that which has been violated and stewarding treasured resources. It is too early to celebrate because there is great uncertainty and peril on this journey. They take comfort in companionship and shared understanding that, from trough to crest, they are working for the common wealth of an interconnected world.
From right to left in the image above:
The Lead Boat
Energy, strategy, ceremony.
The Common Wealth
Plants, Animals, Protista, Fungi, Fresh water, Knowledge , Tools and Building Supplies, Creative Expression
The Community
Hospital, School, Kitchen Garden
Installation materials include steel frames, fabrics and domestic linens, led lights, metal and paper toys, plastic dolls, manufactured dolls clothes and furniture, rice, embellished digitally printed images and text, bamboo boats, hand-wrapped and embellished dolls, natural materials (seeds, nests, feathers, sticks).