The Amazing Monotony: A Response to Chantel Mierau’s “Three Chores”

Strands of white, roving wool wind and unwind, twist and fray, loop and extend in the hands of an audience at Winnipeg’s Platform Gallery. These tiny ravellings are the sly choreography of video and textile artist Chantel Mierau, whose craft-based practice lingers in the tangled spaces between fiddling and making, habit and instinct, interiors and exteriors, centres and fringes, endings and beginnings.

“The body, like space, is boring but amazing,” Mierau says, pulling up a gently scrolling view of earth from the NASA Live webcam. The close framing resembles the dusty round tabletop in her latest video series, Three Chores (2019). “I have outer space in mind. Nothing really appears to happen and yet everything is happening.”

The term chore derives from the Old English chare or char, meaning “the turning or coming around again of a time,” “the returning of an odd job,” “a stroke of work.”

In Three Chores, Mierau turns the prolific messes of the human body into “fanciful concentrations.” These are not the usual taking-out-the-garbage messes but, rather, the accumulations of the dreaming eye and the overactive follicle—organic messes that gather and persist despite us. 

With the methodology of a household hints manual, Mierau tends to the sloughing, fraying, fluctuating matters of the body, dutifully following the eye gunk and rogue hairs to their ends (or beginnings). The result: a tutorial on how a nap can be more productive than we think.

Three Chores is composed of three videos that appear sequentially, over time, in the orderly style of a to-do list. Each chore plays on a loop for two weeks, projected in a small gallery living room before a soft, grey loveseat. Each video comes complete with its own “fiddle prop”—a throw-pillow translation of the video being viewed. The pillows are bodily, three-dimensional extensions of the chores—tactile accompaniments, like the wool roving at her talk, meant to be handled. 

The video Chore Two: Obraumche, has a white cotton cushion punctuated in the centre, navel-like, with the receptive end of a silver button snap. (The term obraumche, Mierau tells us, is Low German for “Little Abraham,” an expression for “the sweet centre, the most delicious bite in a watermelon.”) 

A wool strand streams from the pillow’s corner, fluid and umbilical, running down the couch onto the gallery floor. The end swells into a bulbous shape reminiscent of a blood-pressure pump. The pillow seems to be waiting for connection, another “end” to complete its shining, unsnapped snap.

A theme in Mierau’s work is to highlight the unwanted. The pillow’s care tag, that scratchy flap of paper often cut from linens, is not only present but delicately preserved in wax. In place of the washing instructions is a fibrous swatch of what resembles the artist’s long, brown hair. The body takes the place of language; a lock of hair writes its own private, universal script.

Intimate tactility is a huge impulse in Mierau’s work that is informed by the Protestant work ethic of her Mennonite upbringing.

In past yarn-based work such as Homemaking and Wednesday-ing, Mierau explores impossibility and intricacies in the act of making (e.g. knitting with pins, a spiderweb quilting bee). In Three Chores, however, Mierau goes further to consider the origin of her materials—where does one’s material come from? Where does it go? What does one make of one’s own remains? What comes first: the clogged sink or the cotton-ball egg? 

There’s a certain blind faith suggested in Mierau’s practice. Acting as cinematographer, director, and subject of Three Chores, she literally presses “play” on her own closed eye. There is something to be said about being both a guide and witness to one’s private unravellings. The vulnerability and intimacy of her work is astonishingly tense. Her viewers are trapped in empathetic helplessness as they raise a hand to unsnag the chin hair caught on her arm or reach up to their own face when sand gathers in her eye.

As in past work, frustrating elements of impossibility drive the tension in Three Chores. However, a new temporal conflict emerges: perpetuity; the notion of never being able to complete what the body is determined to continue.

Each chore is a detailed account of time passing through a body. The body itself is a timekeeper, sifting eyesands, spinning filaments, hatching spheres, and sweeping table tops in long, clockwork strokes.

In Chore 1: Busy Napping, an extreme close-up of an eyeball sways under the skin, rolling around in its casing like a larvae in chrysalis. The familiar whirr of a vacuum breaks the spell, the eyelid splits, crusts avalanche onto the pillowslip, the linen stains, and the body moves in to deal with the body. Setting the process on a loop, Mierau relinquishes linearity. The end becomes an illusion. Like a horizon, it is always just out of reach, that thin streak of missed dust when the table is wiped. 

Her tight framings create distance, disorienting the sense of time and place. Depending where one enters the chore, yellow eye jellies might be mistaken for garden slugs, and the swaying metronome of an eyeball for a thrashing chrysalis. As the point of reference is lost, scale wavers and the familiar becomes strange. The body is delivered back to its wild, creaturely, twitching REM-sleep, and we are introduced to the mysterious rhythms of a self far below its own witnessing. 

The cosmic prying for centres and origins appears to be the real chore at hand in Mierau’s work, as one layer opens to another, the body circling itself to some brief and unknown centre. (The French orbite, which translates to eye socket, derives from the Latin orbis, meaning one of the concentric spheres of the heavens.) 

What is the centre when there is no beginning or end? The purpose of the chore seems not so much to get to the end but, rather, to embroider the rhythm of some greater cosmic circling; not so much to complete a task but to be obedient to the messy middle. 

In Chore 2: Obraumche, the artist draws wool fibres from her mouth with fascination and reluctance. She leans over, expectant and expectorant. She waits as one might wait to vomit, in anticipation and dread, pulling on her own fabric, drawing the inside out. She urges, guides, spins, and observes what is revealed to her: the fibres of her own being. She begins to crochet the matter, using a sink drain for her tube frame. 

This self-sufficiency and discovery speaks to notions of artistic creation and self-formation. The private tending to one’s body is a universal matter. Isn’t it true, we all just want to “make something” of ourselves?

Later in Chore 2, when she washes her hair in the same sink, a heavy-headedness comes out the other end of the drain in the form of a matted, bulbous, and grey crocheted sack. A stunning wider shot of the hanging mass reads as a nest and, when torn open, reveals a jellied, yellow, skull-like formation. One thinks of the dough-ball calendar from her recent video Dough Clepsydra (2017) or an infant’s soft head, a celestial sphere.

Simple hand-maneuvering and knocking reveals weight and a hard casing. The little personal planet of collected debris is cracked and pried to the surprisingly soft and white felted interior. The matted fibres, when dug into, reveal yet another centre: a tiny grey washcloth pouch. The pouch is opened to an even brighter cotton ball, pristine, almost luminescent, which is promptly returned to its origin, the artist’s mouth. 

One can’t help but read an environmental conscientiousness in Mierau’s new work. The need to digest our wastes. To wake up to our messes. To find out what is happening to us. In each chore there is a question of responsibility: what to do with this mess? How to treat the stain?

There’s also a general foreboding in the minimalist audio Mierau uses, the ticking-down of time in the metal clicks along porcelain, a disturbing approach in the air in the vacuum’s high whirr, a rupture in the wax casing crack, the filament snap. The squeaky thread strains isolated and visceral enough to tempt toothaches and shivers.

Mierau’s magnified textures and aural eruptions draw us in with sensuality—a push on the pillow, a knock on the wax shell. We lean in to see what gives, urging the thread from the mouth, brushing the hair from its cling. 

The tending of the “private sphere” becomes a wider act. What is processed through the sink drain, how one deals with one’s wastes, what we are willing to follow, to tend to, to refashion, might suggest how we are willing to care for the wider planet. 

“Entanglement” is a term used in quantum mechanics to describe states of intimate bonding between particles. Mierau achieves a kind of quantum craftiness as she embroiders the swirling hole of a sink drain. 

Loops and circles, tubes and cords, knots and hooks articulate the unravelling and reforming of our often-invisible wastes. The edges of a hole, detailed with tinier loops, shows us how the single chore, the single stitch, are all part of a longer, fractal chain of intricate connection.

What is our relationship to our bodies? Do we devour ourselves? Do we crave our own centres? How does what we are willing to harvest from our bodies speak to our greater relationship of what we’re willing to harvest from the planet? 

Rather than escape or brush away the detritus, the build-up, the breakdown, the wear-and-tear, Mierau curiously and vulnerably moves in, gathering the unwanted matters, mythologizing the rogue hairs of quiet, private accumulation. 

One has the sense that Mierau finds artistic potential in the most common experiences. An encounter with a spiderweb breaking across her face inspired Chore 3: Microfibre in which a single, ethereal chin hair grows beyond belief only to disappear, unceremoniously, into a tiny balled-up pill on a washcloth.

Like the slowly revolving sphere that is our planet, Three Chores brings our attention to the body’s orbital motions and processes that are not so much for us to know but, rather, the results of which are ours to tend, consciously, patiently, and, if Mierau has anything to say about it, in a state of awe: “I want to transform rather than escape.” 

Mierau’s Three Chores offers a tender perspective of what it means to care for the body over time. And perhaps the earth. And what is waste? What is living and creating but participating in an endless loop of chores that never quite end? The hair grows, dreams collect along the eye, our insides are drawn out and then swallowed, the earth turns. 

Mierau’s art might be viewed as an attempt to salvage not so much an end result but the rhythms of chorework itself. To be inside a process, however rote, is an act of vitality, motion, connection, even hope. As Simone Weil says: “[A person’s] greatness is always to recreate [their] life, to recreate what is given to [them], to fashion that very thing which [they] undergo. Through work [they] produce [their] own natural existence.”

Like NASA’s live-view of earth, Mierau transmits our hidden bodies back to us—the creaturely rhythms of a sleeping eye, the matted weavings of a clogged sink drain. The conscious task of the chore is mirrored in the subconscious processes of the ever-fluctuating body. 

Rather than escape our messes and our bodies, Mierau moves in, close-up, salvaging the particles, the invisibles, the washed-aways in the hopes that we might take note of “the amazing monotony.”

Jennifer Still is a Winnipeg-based poet working at the intersection of language and material forms. Her latest collection COMMA (Book*hug) received the 2018 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

This article is published in issue 37.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue