Diamante on jaycloth, troubling the relationships of suspicion between domestic workers and their employers.

I was inspired by the death of Faustina Tay to create this piece, whose inability to leave her abuser was directly economic. However, I am also inviting the outrage we feel in hearing of her mistreatment to consider not only those who suffer abuse as our legal system defines it but those who spend their entire life in the comparably happy service of another.

This particular message comes from my own time in ‘elite household service’, where I was playing with Playmobil figures with the young daughter. One day, playing with both ‘royal’ characters from a castle set and some sort of forest people from a treehouse set, I knocked on the castle door with the latter.

‘You can’t come in, we’re having dinner’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re the cleaner’
(Confused, I wondered if she meant the forest person in my hand or me as I had been five minutes ago, cleaning)
‘Why am I the cleaner?’
‘Because of those clothes’
‘And why can’t I come in?’
‘Because you’ll take the silver!!’

Troubling, these upstairs-downstairs dynamics are crucially important to understanding how class impacts society. Domestic workers who suffer abuse are disproportionately women of colour, who also bear a disproportionate share of global poverty.

To stage the work, I have created a video that displays the work with moving lights, reacting to the shimmer – the brighter the silver glows, the less legible the message becomes. It is set to a sound score inspired by my own service, where the sounds of a piano can be heard alongside sounds of washing up and implicitly spatialized: upstairs, downstairs.