Project Description
Helen Miller
FSC-Harvard Fellow 2016-17
Helen Miller is a British-American artist and writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work explores the relationship of visual representation and embodied experience, for example, the role that gesture plays in everyday communication. She is interested in how human development and interaction, and the class dynamics in which they are embedded, can be seen and felt anew. Miller has been an artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and a Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University. Her work was included in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil. She practices somatics and is the Editor of The Feldenkrais Journal, an annual publication on mind-body awareness for artists, performers, and the general public. Miller’s writing and art have been published by The Drawing Center, The Orion Society, Big Red & Shiny, and the Arts Fuse, among others. She grew up in New York and London, received a BA in art and English from the University of California at Berkeley and MAs in art from Harvard. She has taught in Studio for Interrelated Media, Studio Foundation, Art Education, and Liberal Arts at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and curates the MassArt Brant Gallery.
The responsibility of domestic work is often shared across community and class, one form of domesticity intimately tied to the next, one care-taking arrangement nesting in another. As a mother steps away, another mother steps in. One parent goes abroad to work, another stays home. Some men cook. The woman that cares for someone else’s children as if they were her own cares for her own children, and her own children’s children. Grown children sometimes care for their caretakers in turn. How do we come to fill our role or roles in this extended family of care-taking and giving? What is the significance of our opportunities, options, and decisions in this regard? As the filmmaker visits members of her own extended family, And After These Things explores this two-fold question of how one has been cared for and how one comes to care.