365 Days of Labour

Gympie Regional Gallery, 2009

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This work was produced over the course of one year, with a watercolour completed every day. Each page featured an image of someone doing a job that would have been readily identifiable to most people last century, but many of which appear arcane and elusive to today’s audiences. The works are arranged chronologically and feature labour from across the globe. In some images the distinctions between labour and leisure appear lost, and in others the labour described seems to be ironic or nonsensical. As well as being a documentation or compendium of various types of work practices, the series was an attempt to regulate a single project on the basis of daily output. Produced in watercolour and pencil, the series resembles a collection of visual references from encyclopaedias from a past era when it was assumed that the productive capacity of the globe could be identified, organised into a provisional taxonomy, and used to categorise people, cultures and their production as a series of quantifiable outputs.

 

The work was exhibited in the group exhibition Framing Infinity, a drawing and print group exhibition curated by Ross Woodrow at Gympie Regional Gallery (April, May 2009).