Ecologies of care: drawing//cleaning interiors

Abstract

Whilst gender has been critical to the analysis and understanding of the consumption of lived, often domestic, interiors, the analysis of a gendered practice of production has been much less considered. Through the work of feminist philosophers Elizabeth Grosz and Karen Barad, corporeal feminism and new materialist philosophy, and relatively new technologies such as the LiDAR scanner and embodied drawing methods, or through the daily acts of cleaning, I aim to reconfigure the structures and material practices through which interiors are produced, experienced and reproduced. Wymering Manor, a sixteenth century house in Cosham, UK, is used as a case study to reconfigure the drawing practices through which interiors are made. The house provides a space of cultural and historical “affect” in the middle of a suburban setting where local people are invited to engage through volunteering or as an audience member to one of its varied events. The volunteers are drawn into the house looking to connect with others, with history and the pleasure of being in a historic building. Through the collective daily acts as hoovering, taking tours, dusting, making tea and decorating, they embody the manor. As a result of the repetition of these gestures, the house becomes part of those that visit it.