Ironing!!

Girl at Ironing Board, by Edgar Degas

I do hate ironing! It is a kind of a torture for me. So, why I don’t stop it? Because it’s even more torture for me to wear any clothes with any wrinkles! I iron even my pajamas!!
I try to have some fun when I need to iron, I do it twice a month, getting the iron board as surfboard for example and walking like “hey dude, wanna surf?”, but it doesn't work. I just need to look at my column of clothes for my "good" humor return even stronger!

I also have a kind of ritual to do it so. I need to make it up because there is no way I can escape of doing it.
After set the paraphernalia up, I look for something very domestic to watch on TV. In the US I had more fun watching Oprah, Dr. Phil or Food Network, but here in the boring Switzerland I need to look for others shows to start my monthly torment. Looks like I get my period hum! Well, thank God nobody ever saw me ironing when I got my period. I can bit someone easily, easily…

Anyway, the ritual!!! Oh yeah! The clothes need to be separated by fabric, style and gender. Then I make coffee and enjoy it as if was the last coffee in my life. Then, I iron the easiest ones such kitchen towels and save the hardest, such cotton or lining shirt with tons of details, for “le gran finale”! Oh boy! Oh boy! I love those!!!

I need to iron everything in one day and get the iron table out of my multi-task-entertaining-room! The TV plays a very important role in this play. It keeps my mind out of the ironing thing.

Anyway… I just said all that in my prolix way, to say that I have a wonderful friend that found another meaning, another dimension for the act of ironing. She is Claudia Franca, from Brazil. We met when she was my teacher in college there. She is the most complete artist I ever met and a girl that I cannot live away from.

Claudia just transformed the way I looked at ironing. Well, I’m not forgetting the poetic domestic scenes that Degas painted and posted here. However, when I look at those Degas’ women I do not see any sign of pleasure or love.

Let me tell you what Claudia did in a simplist way, if possible!!!

Some years ago, she starting making a list of every single person that she has met in her life. Hard hum!

After that, she contacted those people asking for a piece of their clothes in white color. It was a very hard work. Each person you remember is followed by emotions that make us traveling in time. Also, it is a great exercise of self-knowledge, since we are the some of all people that pass or stay in our lives and she does know that.

When she received all the pieces, she washed them and ironed them. After that, she made a huge column with “us”, folding all the white pieces in the same size and put one over other. It was placed in the middle of a university art gallery, where she was taking grad school.

Last year, 2005, she retook this work with a "new look" and she also did a performance on it. She assembled an iron board, a chair, a TV and a huge hanger in S shape. She ironed again all the white pieces and placed them carefully in the hanger.

Did you get what she did and why she changed my point of view about this task?
Claudia is a very sensitive and caring woman-artist-friend-teacher and washing, ironing and displaying her friends' clothes she was showing how she cares about us, how important we are for her. She was taking care of all her friends, old friends and new friends.

How great is that!!!

When I was talking to her about this exhibition, I started questioning myself how many women know the dimension of this incredible gesture, a gesture of love?

I’m asking because until that day, ironing for me was just a gesture of submission and I never though about it as a gesture of love.

Taking care of somebody clothes implies taking care of somebody…

I’m so far away from love ironing, but I don’t hate it any more. I think!

Take care!

A Woman Ironing, by Edgar Degas