ARTIST STATEMENT
Two main activities dominate both our daily lives and our culture as Americans—work and consumption.Work enables consumption, but rarely of the products of our labor: few Americans consume products resulting from our personal labor, and in general, we are dramatically disconnected from production of the consumer goods we buy and use. Nor is the labor of many Americans—particularly those in blue- collar occupations—directly recognized as a valuable commodity, other than through periodic paychecks.
Yet we are all defined socially largely by our work and our consumption.

My art explores this obscuration of commodity production processes by social and economic disconnective forces. Cultural uncoupling of what one does (work) from what one consumes (products) through specialization, stratification and other "civilizing" processes has historically defined "advanced" industrial cultures. Thus, exposure to materials and tasks that threaten to reveal these hidden processes is viewed unfavorably by the ever-more-sophisticated American consumer. And with our products increasingly being produced in "developing" nations by workers who can purchase little of what they produce for wealthier consumers, we export this pattern along with many less desirable facets of the production process.

Part cultural criticism, part protest, my art seeks to lay bare unrecognized and undervalued aspects of the production cycles of commonly used consumer goods, to reconnect my audience with the human realities embedded within these production cycles, and to inspire viewers/ consumers to act on their understanding of these realities. Sweatshop practices, corporate slavery, outsourcing, labor-related stereotypes, invisible and exploited workers, and the complexity of laborer and consumer relationships with the production cycle are topics I have addressed throughout the past ten years.

Driven by Susan Willis' cultural critique in A Primer For Daily Life, I choose to relate the mundane details of a specific worker category—the metal shavings produced by a machinist in the course of her routine daily work, for example—to the worker's near-invisible role, both within the production cycle that uses the tiny machined product she produces and within our society
as a blue-collar worker.

I examine the complexity of work social structures and the unseen lives of laborers by drawing parallels between beehives and human society. Referring to the work of Karl von Frisch on bee communication and to the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, my work on bees attempts to reveal a spiritual anonymity within the construction of work relationships and inherent to a closer connection between production and materials that are connected through their history of use in the everyday experience of work. By using tools, garments, techniques and waste from production processes within and outside the home, I seek to recognize the people whose lives they were a part of and to question our society's perceptions of work and consumption, and the values we place on these.

Using a visual approach to social challenge inspired by Alfredo Jaar, my current works link iconic corporate logos with representations of anonymizing work tasks to question the labor practices of American-based corporations throughout the world in their production of consumer goods primarily for American sale and consumption.
Kathy A. Budd