Reaching, fluttering, straining, stretching arms, hands, and fingers fill the gallery this summer in Olivia Smith’s Women’s Work. Pink, purple, and yellow expenditures weave through an architectural grid made of wooden dow rods whose right angles have been softened by bits of furry aqua yarn. Against these feathered beams, the crisp edges of silhouetted limbs—which Smith has delicately cut from paper—move with nimble intention. The relationship between these limbs and their architectural environment is curious. No doubt the hands work vigorously, but it is difficult to discern if they work in, out, around, in spite of, or in production of the blue fiber structure itself.

This concern touches upon the core of Smith’s practice. While society’s patriarchal architecture instructs women to keep up appearances of elegance and ease, behind the scenes, women labor tirelessly. Smith uses hands to depict the underacknowledged physical and mental labor women perform to maintain and nurture their communities and the lives of loved ones (and, if they are lucky enough to have the time, their own lives). However, there is also beauty and gratification in this care. Despite its difficulty, women make the choice to balance travail, creativity, and weariness with grace. Maneuvering within society’s restrictive systems, women’s labor quietly transforms systems themselves. Like Smith’s tedious application of soft aqua yarn, the unseen work of women invites softness and joy, creativity and cherishment, into our world’s hard-edged structures. 

The hands in Women’s Work belong to Smith. She traces her poses from silhouetted light projections, embracing her body’s different shapes: from delightful dance-like expressions, to language-like signs, to stiff clenching brought on by taxation. In this exhibition, we witness the joys and frustrations of the labor of one as, in her own words, Smith, like so many women, “can’t seem to take a break.” Women’s Work operates as a call to ease this burden and help each other—to first recognize, appreciate, and perhaps even lighten the load of the women workers who are so vital to our communities.