My work examines the domestic sphere as a site where intimacy, labour, and instability converge. Working across photography, video, sculpture, and performance, I use materials drawn from the home — bread dough, furniture, textiles, clothing, and discarded belongings — to investigate how private spaces absorb broader social, economic, and political pressures. Often imagined as a place of comfort and stability, the home emerges in my practice as a fragile and continually shifting structure shaped by migration, economic precarity, gendered labour, and the passage of time.

Bread dough has long been central to my practice, both as material and metaphor. Rooted in my upbringing in an Italian immigrant household in Australia, dough carries the embodied knowledge of generations of women whose labour has sustained domestic life. It speaks to nourishment, care, and cultural inheritance, but also to repetition, exhaustion, and the expectations placed upon women’s bodies. As an unstable, time-based material, dough resists permanence, expanding, cracking, collapsing, and changing in ways that cannot be entirely controlled. Influenced by Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, I use these material processes to trouble the boundaries between body and object, care and decay, preservation and loss.

My recent return to my family home in Australia to care for my ageing mother has brought these longstanding investigations into a more immediate and lived relationship with the domestic environment. I have chosen to reorient my life around this time with her, recognising the privilege of sharing in her everyday existence while navigating the physical and emotional demands of caregiving. The rhythms of our days are shaped by acts of care and maintenance, alongside moments of pleasure, independence, and continuity. My mother still dances in the morning sunlight and tends the vegetable garden she has cultivated for more than five decades. Its seasonal produce becomes the ingredients for the meals I now prepare for her, extending a cycle of nourishment and labour that has shaped our family across generations.

Within this environment, I have become increasingly attentive to the material histories accumulated throughout the house. Tablecloths, sheets, doilies, clothing, crockery, and everyday objects bear the traces of bodies, gestures, and routines repeated over decades. These belongings are not simply repositories of memory or relics of a disappearing past. Many remain in use, continuing to participate in the life of the home. Others offer possibilities for dismantling, reconstruction, and transformation. I am interested in the tension between preserving these objects and allowing them to take on new forms, and in how material transformation might carry forward something of the lives and labour embedded within them.

This evolving relationship with the family home has also prompted me to reconsider the boundaries between artistic practice and everyday life. The knowledge my mother has passed to me through her hands — through cooking, growing food, and the countless gestures involved in maintaining a household — continues to inform how I understand material, repetition, and making. As our roles shift, the acts of caring, preparing food, handling objects, and sustaining daily routines have become inseparable from the questions that drive my work. Rather than approaching my mother’s ageing as something to document directly, I am drawn to the materials, relationships, and exchanges through which our lives continue to be negotiated.

Alongside these intimate investigations, my practice considers the broader conditions of domestic instability and displacement. Objects abandoned by those forced from their homes through economic pressures, belongings left behind after death, and possessions accumulated within my own family home reveal how material things register the consequences of social change. Through photography and sculptural intervention, I examine the uneasy relationship between attachment and dispossession, and the ways ordinary objects can embody both personal histories and larger structures of inequality.

Ultimately, I approach the home neither as a sanctuary nor solely as a site of confinement, but as a place of ongoing negotiation, where care and exhaustion, intimacy and resistance, continuity and change coexist. Through the transformation of familiar materials and the repetition of everyday gestures, my work considers what we inherit, what we preserve, what we relinquish, and how meaning continues to be made through the fragile, often invisible labour of sustaining life.