Within her artistic practice, Emmeline de Mooij uses installation, performance, sculpture, textile and video. An important subject in her work is care, maintenance and repair. De Mooij investigates the mechanisms behind the low status of care in society, such as the disproportionate burden of women in paid and unpaid care work. Additionally, with her work de Mooij explores speculative scenarios that offer an alternative for the dominant ideal of the human as independent and unitary being. Again and again she examines the
possibility of recuperating a lost unity between the human and its surroundings, based on the recognition of the inter-relational character of being human: embodied, embedded and in symbiosis with other life forms.
De Mooij’s new body of work consists of a series of mattresses that are ‘disguised’ as traditional works of art on the wall. They are processed with a diverse range of residual and available materials that have been sewn together. ‘Patchwork’, a typical ‘hobby art’ technique frequently applied by women, is used here in an intelligent way to raise questions about hospitality.
The works can be unhooked from the wall and serve as a guest mattress.