One Thread Many Loops
The encoded materiality of home
Round and round in circles making invisible labour visible.
ARTIST STATEMENT
In "One Thread Many Loops: The encoded materiality of home," Mieke van den Berg explores the encoded materiality of home and the domestic life of a mother, developing a personal language through conceptual art-making in the intimate setting of her home. The red thread symbolizes time, domesticity, connecting lineage, societal interconnections, anger, and power. The wool she uses represents the thread of time and her childhood memories, while her to-do lists form a framework of anarchiving, highlighting the mental and invisible labour embedded within these notes. Through the repetitive and time-consuming methods of crocheting and stitching, van den Berg uncovers new perspectives, revealing unique relationships between invisible domestic labour and the expectations placed on women to donate their time in the male dominated art world.
At the core of van den Berg's work is the endurance required to create "Housework" and "Embodied Labour" reflecting the monotonous duties performed by women. She critically examines the significance of women's craft-making as a subversive and empowering feminist contemporary art practice. By displaying these installations in the gallery, she aims to validate women's work and expose the burden of invisible labour while paying tribute to her foremothers who laboured in silence.
Exhibition Information
January 18
January 18
February 2
Last Day of the exhibition
Opening hours
Tuesday to Friday, 10am to 4pm
Saturday to Sunday, 10am to 3pm
ESSAY
Mieke van den Berg | One Thread Many Loops: The Encoded Materiality of Home
Noosa Regional Gallery, Noosa
9 November 2024–2 February 2025
Red threads weave with determined consistency through Mieke van den Berg’s work. They twist and loop and dangle. Viewing her art is akin to touching these threads. On the tips of our fingers, we can feel their soft, familiar texture: reminiscent of handmade jumpers, woven scarves, and knitted blankets. To look is to imagine the even tension of her blanket stitch, the rippled surface of her french knitting, the near weightlessness of her hanging threads.
And yet, there are also unfamiliar textures at play in van den Berg’s work. Her sculptural objects freeze woolen threads in impossible and unlikely organic shapes. Here, thread becomes stiff and strange. We might envisage running our fingers around the perimeter of one of her object’s many holes, its brittle surface repelling our touch. In this work, van den Berg transmutes wool’s associations with the everyday, with our bodies, and with home, into the realm of art. In these porous objects of negative space, wool shares imaginary horizons with artists from Lindy Lee to Mona Ryder and Ruth Asawa, with materials from steel to fabric and wire.
The textural differences in van den Berg’s thread—soft and stiff, known and unknown, belonging to the home and the white cube—speak to larger concerns in her work that interlace and pull, with disquieting insistence, in opposite directions.
In van den Berg’s home studio, the artist is also a mother. Her scavenged and gifted hoards of red wool share space with baskets of laundry and sit within the weekly rhythm of school-aged children. ‘One Thread, Many Loops’ works through the possibilities and frustrations of this coexistence. It acknowledges motherhood, domesticity, and gendered labour as ever-present conditions in the artist’s life, and seeks to rethink, re-visualise, and re-value these realms.
Housework (2024) explicitly achieves this by incorporating notes from home: ephemeral to-do lists and family communiques. Snippets read: “gone for walk back soon,” “love you,” “laughing cow,” “epistemology = theory of knowledge.” Others reveal lists and unknown mathematical tallies. Some of it is homework. Some of it relates to bills and shopping. Some of it is messages to one another. Some of it is reminders to self. And some of it hints at the artist who exists in this house alongside the mother. We find her in doodles, schematics, and references
to critical theory. Collectively, these banal yet intimate domestic fragments bring to the fore women’s unseen and unpaid second and third shifts. Said otherwise, they highlight the additional house work and mental load women complete on top of their working day.
Collating these notes into a rhythmic lattice, van den Berg initiates two conversations. One engages with Modernism’s grid—which sought to find a universal language of abstraction—ruffling a masculine search for purity and balance by inserting tactile, textural stitches; women’s words; and women’s work. The other engages with an expansive history of feminine and feminist quilts. In lieu of the practical and decorative purposes of quilts from the past, van den Berg joins artists like Raquel Ormella and Vanessa Barragão. The three create art for gallery walls, insisting on raising the intersecting values of women’s labour and women’s art.
Embodied Labour (2024) is more subtle, yet it equally draws together art-making, gendered work, mothering, and the home, using women’s time as starting point and critical parameter. Once a day for 31 days—referencing a woman’s menstrual cycle—van den Berg crocheted a single red ball of wool into a sculptural vessel. Creating each object required approximately 3.5 hours from her day, or the same amount of time that women typically dedicate to daily housework. Further mimicking the contours of domestic life and labour, van den Berg used iterative, repetitive methods of making. In her words: “There is both burden and soothing relief in the repetition. The single ball of wool contributes to a sense of being done . . . but [like laundry] there is always another ball of wool.”
Hung from the ceiling and trailing singular red threads, the vessels of Embodied Labour suggest small, humanlike forms. Despite their slightly unnerving existence, they elicit our observation and care, and call attention to the artist-mother’s hand.
Pairing Housework and Embodied Labour, van den Berg speaks in two registers—one archives tasks, the other materialises time. In doing so, she generously provides two routes to understanding her core purpose: to make the invisible visible and to work, stitch by stitch, toward a vastly fairer allocation of gendered labour and recognition, both within the gallery and at home.
By Dr Louise R Mayhew
Australian Feminist Art Historian and Founding Editor of Lemonade: Letters to Art