Sawyer Rose is many things.
She is a sculptor. She is an installation and social practice artist. She is a native of North Carolina. However, she is a woman at the core of the project that’s now been brought to UNC.
Rose has been using her research and art skills for the past seven years to create a series of works titled “The Carrying Stones Project.”
She said the aim of the work is to spark meaningful conversations about women’s work inequity. Throughout the research process, she learned how significant the difference between the labor of men and women was.
“I wasn’t surprised that those disparities existed,” she said. “I was surprised how stark the differences were. Women do more unpaid labor than men in every country in the world.”
Rose said she was shocked to find that women do more labor in many areas, including child and elder care, cooking, cleaning and volunteering. This inspired her to visualize women’s work through her art.
She began the series by profiling women of diverse backgrounds in order to gather data about their paid and unpaid labor. She then created sculptures visually representing the data accompanied by photographs of women with the art.
Alongside the sculptural work, she also created paper and panel pieces about gender pay gaps and other issues facing women in the workplace.
Rose brings awareness to these issues by integrating social practice art into the project, which she sai gets community members involved in the making or experience of the project.
