Hello, my name is Kelly O’Brien. I’m an artist and researcher. I’m originally from Derby, where I grew up on a council estate with my single mother and Irish immigrant family.
’No Rest for the Wicked’ started when I became interested in photography in 2004. Over the years, I’ve documented the intimate lives of my mother and grandmother – capturing images that quietly express the realities of being “working poor” women and how such experiences of intergenerational poverty, along with paid and unpaid labour, affect both body and mind.
I come from a long line of cleaners. One of my first jobs, when I was 13, was cleaning a nightclub with my mum and other women from the estate. My mum, Janet, now in her mid-60s, is still a cleaner, sometimes working 13-hour days. My grandmother, Bridget, was also a cleaner after she emigrated from Ireland in the 1950s.
This display contains seven works, four of which will be described. The leftmost photograph is the largest and the prints progressively become smaller in size.
In the photographs are my mum and grandma, who are my collaborators in this work. They are often shown looking away from the lens, as fragmented body parts, or hidden by the tools of their work. These photographs are in different sizes and are presented unframed in a scattered arrangement on a wall covered with magnolia-white wallpaper, textured with wood chips. My mum and grandma’s council houses both had this wallpaper; it was the background to a lot of unpaid labour performed within these domestic spaces.
On the far left is the largest, poster-sized photograph of a white woman dressed in a cleaner’s uniform of a purple apron and pink plastic gloves. Her face is hidden by the tasselled pink head of a mop that she holds in her right hand. Bricks are strapped to the soles of her scuffed, sturdy brown boots, and she stands on the trailing edge of a white bedsheet pinned to the wall behind her, like a DIY photography studio. Embroidered in small pink letters on her apron are the words “No rest for the wicked”.
To the right of this is a smaller print, showing the same woman bending forward at an almost 90-degree angle, leaning on the mop and with her hair covering her face.
My mum Janet is the woman in these photographs. Here she talks about the process of making this work:
“Me and Kelly worked as a pair to make these performative images – one photograph showing a statuesque cleaner, depicting the strength of the working women we know, and then another image where the figure is slumped down, holding on to her tools to stay on her feet, communicating the reality of what doing such work can do to the body. I know how it feels to be that exhausted from work, from being poor. Making this set of images was a way to articulate my own struggles through the camera, expressing the feelings of tiredness through photography, to offer something relatable to others who are also feeling worn down by toil.”
Two photographs in the centre-right of the display capture moments of quiet downtime between labour. One is a close-up photograph of my grandma’s back, marked with small red scratches. An old white bra straining across her back is threadbare and slightly yellowed by repeated washing and use. The top hook of three is missing.
The other photograph, in black and white, is of my mum’s arm holding a roll-up cigarette. Her right elbow rests on a table, propping her strong forearm upright; her cigarette is perched casually between thumb and forefinger.
Although I am not currently working as a domestic cleaner, I continue to clean. Not in nightclubs, houses or offices, but through my practice as an artist. My work now involves cleaning up, reorganising and repairing harmful representations that negatively impact the lives of poor and working-class women.
My work is for all workers who are knackered because of the paid and unpaid labour that they repeatedly do. For all of you who feel undervalued and unseen.
This is the end of stop 11.