The feeling that my hands were tied persisted throughout my child raising years. I expressed this most simply in the printed images of a bow with heat transferred photographic hands on the ends of the ties. The bow was attractive as were the circumstances of my restrictions.
After working on my first series of aprons which were etched into zinc plates, I further explored the possibility of making a statement about the restrictions placed upon women by domestic circumstances. I used the same type of ribbon which formed the waistband and ties in the early etched aprons. Without etching the bows for the series of Tying Hands , I printed them directly from the impressions that they made in ink on a zinc plate. To the ends of the ties I heat transferred photo images of hands. I experimented with different hand gestures, and the shape of the bow and with colours. This produced a series of seven monoprints.
The photographs of my hands that I used in this series. were taken by Marilyn Dyer, an artist friend in similar domestic circumstances in Kingston. I used the colour xerox facility which was available in Toronto for artists in 1981, to transfer the images from slides to the heat transfer paper. This technology was not widely available at the time.
This was my first use of heat transferred imagery. When the technology became available for use with home computers and printers I used it more frequently to add photographic imagery when it was useful, especially in the Housework Series of Prints.
The theme of tied hands surfaced in other series of my work. While making the drawings of GDP Excluded Aprons, and the monoprints in the Exploited Aprons series, I included various arrangements of tied hands.
