Heather Yip

Heather Yip

Heather Yip

In my practice I am focused on investigating the impact of technology on human development. Specifically, my inquiry occurs within my own home and the context of my children’s ongoing obsession with smartphones and other related media. In the research that fuels my art practice I have launched a vigorous examination of my role as a parent whose responsibility it is to both mediate and moderate my family’s use of screen based technologies. In this relentless pursuit I have made many attempts to set up boundaries for my children’s use of their devices, which has inspired me to explore these concepts through the lens of my performing other motherly tasks such as doing laundry, vacuuming and cooking. It is through the use of some of the machines and objects that I use to perform these tasks that has afforded me the agency to create work in a more enjoyable and perhaps playful manner. My art practice also allows me the chance to be in my studio (an oasis) to escape if only temporarily from the frustration of the constant household and emotional labour that I must perform. It is the irony that as a parent I have introduced my children to technology and its accompanying objects and now because of this I have to restrict my children’s use of it. Because I suffer from guilt associated with this fact I have made it a part of my parental practice (which in turn enters into my art practice) my job to play more with my kids, this includes making blanket forts, playing tag and all kinds of board games to name a few things. It has also inspired me to investigate Nicholson’s theory of loose parts and to make sure my kids’ have more opportunities to play with all kinds of things ‘off-line’. As modalities in my practice I have employed video, installation as well as two dimensional mixed media art making in an attempt to try and understand my kids’ love of technology.