What Is More Of Eight Legs And Hands?

A soft textile sculpture in variable dimensions
2025

What Is More of Eight Legs and Hands?
is a large, soft textile sculpture that imagines a body without a head: eight intertwined limbs, three hearts and nine brains. The work emerged from my ongoing research into labour, care, domesticity and the ways these forms of work become embodied.

The octopus exaggerates a familiar social myth: that women are naturally good at multitasking, able to care, organise, remember, produce and respond to several demands simultaneously. Rather than celebrating this supposed ability, the work asks what lies behind it. What happens when multitasking is treated as a natural feminine capacity rather than recognised as labour?

The eight limbs become an image of the multiplication of responsibilities placed on women's bodies. The three hearts extend this multiplication into emotional and care labour, while the nine brains evoke the mental and organisational labour of anticipating, remembering and managing. Together, they create an absurdly over-equipped body that suggests the impossible amount of capacity that can be expected from one person.

The sculpture has no conventional head or central body. Its limbs are intertwined and dependent on one another, disrupting the idea of a single centre controlling the whole. It becomes an ambiguous, collective organism rather than a portrait of an individual woman.

The work is deliberately soft and inviting. Viewers
can sit, lean, rest, fold or wrap themselves around the limbs. The sculpture can therefore become a shared environment rather than a fixed object, allowing the audience to physically encounter this exaggerated body.