Domestic Fetishes emerges from a particular historical and psychological perspective. It is the work of a woman born in the mid-20th century, raised within the moral landscape of the Canadian prairies. When speaking with Susan Andrews Grace this past December, it was clear that being raised under Catholic doctrine within a postwar household and the white prairie winters clearly influenced her work.

To understand this installation, one must look to the materials used in its construction all white washed,  shaped by an era in which domestic life was not only more private, its ideology was less negotiable. Were these Western Ideologies? Have we moved away from them? Are we returning to them? Is it for better or for worse?

For women growing up in Canada in the 1950s and early 1960s, domestic life may have been seen as a pre-ordained and often inescapable destiny, discipline and dignity. The home was framed as sacred, orderly, and morally charged. Catholicism reinforced this structure through ritual, hierarchy, and pure sacrificial obedience, in silence. In the Catholic Church, the Virgin Mary was revered and venerated as a woman and a mother, yet, with the exception of a very few, women were excluded from power, leadership, and authorship within the Church. Is this a paradox? Reverence without agency. Is this the foundation of Susan's work?

The installation’s overwhelming whiteness is glaring. White is not merely aesthetic; it is moralized. At one end it can feel as arid and sterile as snow-covered prairie landscapes. On the other end - Catholic ideals of cleanliness, virginity, and spirituality emerge. Andrews Grace describes her connection to white as a pre-verbal memory. Is it a necessary backdrop for her creative language - rather than a colour? 

Her plastered linens are frozen in time - fossilized into artifacts. Washing, mending, maintaining - activities that have historically been undervalued and considered just a part of the unpaid domestic labour expected of women of the household. Yet, there is a stark contrast afoot. The household is becoming more of a dream than reality. 

A monolithic wedding dress displayed for all to see. Created when marriage was still widely understood as the path to legitimacy and security. Did this dress attract a suitable mate with its own gravitational pull? It is an institution rendered from textile. From the perspective of many generations, the wedding dress was inseparable from sexual restraint, reproduction, moral worth, and lifelong responsibility. Does this dress belong to a person or an ideology?

Opposite the wedding dress, phallic forms introduce a counter-symbol. Equally shaped by mid-century ideology. These objects blur the line between biological masculinity and weaponry, sexuality and violence. For men born into the same era, masculinity was frequently defined through unquestioning service, sacrifice, and aggression - particularly in relation to war. Andrews Grace’s phalli resemble gun barrels and cigars: symbols of authority, leisure, love, lust and lethal force. Does their upright formation call upon military order and religious procession? Tenuous materiality places them into compromising positions. Power here is rigid, but also fragile.

Importantly, Domestic Fetishes exposes how genders were, and are still to this day, constrained by roles imposed from above by a number of dogmatic groups, be it cultural, political, religious or scientific. Women - subjugated into stillness; men - subjugated into violence. All denied the fullness of their humanity.

The red-sheeted bed plays a major role in this symbolic realm. Red exists as a bilateral convergence to this primal dialectic: sex, blood, birth, death, pleasure, consequence. The grounds unto which ideology fails to remain abstract. It is the moment of truth. For the generation that shaped Susan, the bed was often a site of obligation rather than autonomy. For women it was bound tightly to morality and motherhood. For men it was like walking a tightrope of either success or shame. 

When viewed by younger generations, Domestic Fetishes may register differently. Contemporary audiences, who are not as time-worn, may not carry the same embodied memory of Catholic authority or rigid domestic expectation. The white wedding dress may appear theatrical - now worn as a fashion choice by those who are more nostalgic. The phallic weapons may read as satire; the heightened sculptural embodiment of lewd graffiti found on notebooks and back alleys.

Domestic Fetishes may function as a material archive of many belief systems that continue to mutate beneath perceived contemporary freedoms. While younger viewers may not inherit all of the same doctrines, they are still anchored to the unrelenting demands of monetizing labour, reproduction, politics, militarization, and the moral policing of bodies. These structures may shift over time, but they always seem to re-emerge.

For younger audiences, the installation may also provoke questions about generational language. What once required coded symbolism and material metaphor may now be spoken of more directly. Whether in the classroom, at home with parents, or on social media platforms. Silence and restraint may have been a survival strategy in earlier cultural climates, but is that still the case now?

Take today's political climate and hold it up beside your social class. You may be closer to this work than you think - or you might be sitting in a cockpit of a space phallus with five of your closest Instagram followers.