The Carrying Stones Project: Visualizing Women’s Work

Sawyer Rose, Writer | Karin Luner, Editor

Sawyer Rose, FRSA, MRSS is a sculptor, installation and social practice artist. Her work on The Carrying Stones Project addresses women’s work inequity and has been featured by the New York Times, Ms. Magazine, and BUST Magazine.
Rose has been a resident artist at Yaddo, MASS MoCA, VCCA, The Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), Moulin à Nef (France), and the Ragdale Foundation. She has been awarded grants from The Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation, The Puffin Foundation, and The Creative Capacity Fund.
Rose is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts (London) and a Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors (London). She is the Past President and current Communications Chair of the Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art (San Francisco).
Born and raised in North Carolina, she holds a degree in Art History from Williams College in Massachusetts and currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is a member of the Northern California Chapter.

www.carrying-stones.com
@ksawyerrose

The Carrying Stones Project celebrates the strength of working women while shining a light on the systemic inequities they face in the workplace, at home, and in their communities. I take real-world work data from a diverse sample of women and use it to build large-scale data visualization art, telling their personal stories and highlighting how labor equity benefits everyone.

What is Women’s Work Inequity?

Women’s work inequity (or gendered labor inequity) is a complex issue that includes the gender pay gap, disparity in promotions, fewer women in high-paying fields, workplace harassment, and—critically—the disproportionate burden of unpaid labor. This tilted playing field affects women economically, physically, and emotionally. Race and class further amplify these disparities, with women of color and low-wage workers being the most impacted.

When I started looking at the data, I was struck by the scale of the problem: stark divides between men and women in unpaid labor, underpaid labor, career advancement, and representation in high-paying, male-dominated fields. Women do more domestic labor than men in every country in the world—cooking, cleaning, childcare, and eldercare—keeping them from advancing at work and in society. Beyond household tasks, women also take on more mental labor—the work of remembering, planning, and organizing—and emotional labor—the work of managing relationships and keeping others happy. Even community volunteerism, which is caretaking of the larger community, disproportionately falls to women.

From Numbers to Art

As an artist, I wanted to find a way to present all this research in a fresh, creative way—something that could spark curiosity and create an opportunity for learning and, hopefully, real-world change.

These days, we’re all drowning in facts, news, and social media; it’s hard to catch anyone’s attention. I wanted to present everything I was learning in a way that would engage people—something that would make them stop, look, and think. So, I turned to data visualization, building sculpture installations that transform the labor numbers into something people can see and feel. By making these stories visible, I hope to build bridges of understanding between people who experience labor inequity firsthand and people who may not have considered its impact.

Tracy: Balancing Professional Life & Motherhood

My data visualizations from The Carrying Stones Project are mostly sculptural installations paired with photographic portraits. I start by finding participants who are woman-identifying folks from diverse backgrounds (different ages and races, but also different work functions, socioeconomic situations, with or without kids), who are willing to track what they do in their waking hours for about three weeks.

I developed a custom timekeeping app for the project that people can use on their phones, and they input what they did each hour of their day— paid work, unpaid work, other activites…

Above are the sculpture and portrait I made from project participant Tracy’s work data. They are a good example to look at to understand a bit about my process.

Tracy is married, works full-time as an attorney, is mother to a daughter who is a budding martial arts wonder-girl (so she’s got practice schedules, tournaments), and Tracy handles almost all the domestic labor in her home.

After I received Tracy’s data, I translated it into this 8 x 12 foot sculpture that abstracts and encodes the numbers of labor hours into a form that’s readable as a graphic.

In this piece the solid concrete forms represent Tracy’s paid labor, the brass wireframes represent her unpaid labor (I use wireframes because unpaid work is less visible and gets less respect than paid work in our society), and the very few spaces you see in the grid represent the waking hours when she was doing anything other than working. Keep in mind, too, that anything other than work means anything—seeing friends, getting some exercise, even going to the dentist.

The order of the data markers is hour-by-hour in the order that Tracy reported them to me. So, in addition to a numerical count of her working hours, you also get a timeline-by-task, which reveals other, richer, information about her life. For example, a common pattern among women with childcare responsibilities is 1) unpaid labor in the morning, getting a child ready for school, followed by 2) paid work, and then 3) unpaid labor again at lunchtime—calling the school or shopping for the family online, for example.

After the sculptures are finished, I take photographic portraits of the subjects lifting and carrying their sculptures, literally “shouldering their burden.” This is where the project is the most expressive—where you see that there is a real person and a real life behind the numbers.

Lauren: Women in Academia

Here’s another piece, this tells the story of Lauren. Lauren is a professor of history as well as the mother of an elementary school age daughter. Between her scholarship and service to her university and the largely invisible work of a mom’s mental labor, Lauren says she feels she is always wearing way too many hats.

I’m using the same visual language here as in the Tracy piece the few open spaces in the matrix are the waking hours that Lauren was not working and then in this one, the gold and brown “books” each represent one hour of paid labor, and the silver and white “books” each represent one hour of unpaid labor.

I choose the women I depict in the project both for their compelling personal work stories and for the larger issues their stories bring up. In this case, Lauren’s personal story also gives me a chance to share in the accompanying wall text that women in academia give on average 26 more hours of service per year than their male colleagues and that those extra hours of unpaid labor that they’re doing are not reflected in statistics like, for example only 7.7% of tenured professors are women of color.

So, I start with personal data, process it through storytelling and visual art to make it more available, more reachable, and then I circle back with even more data in the wall text, but I’ve provided context and human connection that will hopefully help the viewer access the message I’m trying to share.

Interactive Data Sculptures

To help viewers understand the data in a personal way, I’ve also developed interactive artworks and events that let people step into the role of my project participants. One such piece, The Weight of Your World, allows visitors to estimate their hours of paid and unpaid work, then carry that weight in stones—literally lifting the load of their own labor in a physical way. Another piece, Balance Due, invites visitors to co-create a data sculpture by adding their personal labor data to transparent spheres that form part of a larger installation.

These interactives feel like play, but they also offer genuine insight. Many people are shocked when they see their own data—sometimes they’ve never thought about how they (or their partners or teammates) spend their working days.

A selection of works from The Carrying Stones Project will be on display at the United Nations Headquarters in NYC, Feb 27-March 21, 2025.

Rules, Responsibilities, Restraints: Women’s Pursuit of Equity also features Fleur Spolidor’s compelling Swimsuits Series about gender equity issues.

Organized by Spolidor and Rose, this exhibit is endorsed by the European Union Delegation to the United Nations.
It is in connection with CSW69 and International Women’s Day (8 March).

For the full exhibition and more about Sawyer Rose, visit her website: www.carrying-stones.com
Follow her on Instagram @ksawyerrose