Ellie Nakamura-Corfield

Dinner

Dinner, a set table of images of community (friends, family, mutuals) who work blue collar jobs.

“Working class & themes of labour. I wanted to express representation of the working class, including service workers, employees in tourism, blue collar workers and etc. I did also use personal photos of myself and my family, as I grew up on welfare despite both my parents also working odd jobs in hotels, retail and gift shops over the years. For anyone who’s grown up in these circumstances or perhaps experienced them later on, you know how labour intensive these shifts can be. How draining physically, mentally and emotionally they can be overtime. After a long shift all you want to do is go home and sleep, your brain is off and the only time you get to yourself is a nice meal and rest. Oftentimes, you probably don’t have time to cook, takeout becomes apart of your routine. Those restaurant workers understand your labour, they put the same amount of time and energy into their meals just to serve you. That act of labour from work, farm to table, cook to customer, customer to server, is an endless cycle. This project was labour intensive, as I wanted to add to that process through performative actions on hand stitching and hand dyeing all the fabrics. 3-4 days of process work. ”