I have been writing down everything I do and spend money on every day for about 10 years. I made my last list on January 24, 2007. I found that it made me too sad to look back on my life at that point and reflect on it in such detail. Instead, I would rather remember and record with a more selective memory.
With that in mind, I’ve set about remembering my most recent trip to India. The one I took to get pregnant! This February, having found out that my fallopian tubes are blocked, I realized that the only way I could get pregnant was through in vitro fertilization. However, neither my insurance nor any insurance that I could get as an individual covers IVF and in the US, the bill for that procedure runs up to about $20,000. After a bit of research, I found that in India, the cost is only about $3,000 and at that point, one of my partner’s cousins in India volunteered to be our donor.
It worked! At this moment, I’m pregnant.
The other thing I’ve been working on is kind of purging text from my work as the lists fade out. Instead, I’ve created all the letters from my last list (that one from January 24, 2007) out of my trash that I’ve been saving for the past 4 months. These letters are 3 dimensional and will be in a big pile with only a few recognizable words in that jumble that explain why I stopped writing the lists.
The Stripe Factory
I have been painting stripes as part of my work for about 10 years now.
Up until about 3 years ago, the stripes were integrated into my drawings which were drawings of everything I spent money on. One red stripe represented each dollar I spent, and one green stripe represented one dollar I earned. There were also grey stripes which represented debt.
About 3 years ago, I started making panels that were just stripes using the data of my financial life. The first of these represented one month of red stripes and green stripes, painted in the order which money came in and out of my bank account. In addition to
making these monthly panels, I made a series of very large panels that represented major financial events in my life.
The last series of panels represented my building mortgage which has 627,000 grey stripes for each dollar I owe my bank. This many stripes would have taken me more than a year to paint on my own, so I had to hire 14 people a day to help me paint the stripes to meet my deadline.
The production of this work really inspired me. The overall composition of the grey panels reflects each stripe painter’s hand so the stripes become a metaphorical genetic map that identifies each person who contributed to the work.
Six months ago, I began focusing on this aspect of my work by creating a stripe factory that spins labor into very dense matter. This factory will produce no toxic waste, no by-products, and will create a pleasant working environment for its workers who are acknowledged in the final panel.
The stripes have become unmoored from my personal data, and instead, represent only their own production. For this reason, I’ve chosen to mix the reds and greens resulting in 8 shades of earth color that will make up the field of each panel.
Panels can be custom ordered starting with 50,000 stripes in either a horizontal, vertical or square format. Each stripe will cost $.15. $.05 of this cost will be collected to pay the stripe painters each of whom will earn $.05 per stripe they paint. The remaining $.10 will be collected upon completion and delivery of the panel and will be split between the gallery and myself. The stripe painters will sit in the gallery going about their own business until an order comes in, at which point they will start painting. This project will continue for approximately one year.
- Danica Phelps
