Working Inventory

Working Inventory is a hundred-day accumulation on a single cloth: one addition per day, made during a forced break from professional and academic life due to illness. Parts of a work shirt, outlines of research notebooks, the shadow of a laundry basket, a hand towel, beef bones, ribbons, broken shoelaces. Everything that constituted a life across its roles, laid onto the same ground. They dance, mingle, encroach and fight into a whole.

I made this over one hundred consecutive days in 2023, during a period of enforced absence from professional and academic work due to health. Each day, one thing was added to the whole cloth. The constraint was method and subject at once.

The objects are specific: parts of a work shirt, the outlines of academic research notebooks, the outline of the shadow cast by a laundry basket, a hand towel from a date night, the shapes of beef bones from making broth, ribbons from gifts, broken shoelaces from the children's shoes. Not symbols. The actual objects of the roles I occupied across those hundred days: professional, academic, domestic worker, cook, wife, mother, artist.

The enforced break had removed the external structures through which identity is normally maintained and communicated: job title, institutional affiliation, professional output. What remained was everything else, which turned out to be a great deal. What do those remaining roles amount to when they're the only ones in play? What does it mean to renegotiate identity when the most legible parts of it have been taken away?

Across the surface, the additions overlap, cover, encroach and resist each other. No role dominates. No single day is distinguishable from the next. The hundred-day structure makes the whole visible: not a sequence but a field, everything present at once.