New Work: Diamonds and Sand

Diamonds and Sand, a light reactive dye print by Elaine Luther, 2025.

This is yet another of my artworks inspired by a twitter post. Amy Diehl, PhD, quoted Eve Rodsky on twitter.

Here’s what Rodsky, author of Fair Play, said in an NPR interview:

“As a society, we’ve chosen to view and value men’s time as if it’s diamonds and finite, and we’ve chosen to value women’s time as if it’s infinite like sand.”

I made a piece about this previously, it was in this section of my solo show at Northern Illinois University’s Backspace Gallery:

Diamonds and Sand Wall by Elaine Luther at NIU’s Backspace Gallery. The tweet in the middle sized circle says, “As a society, we’ve chosen to view and value men’s time as if it’s diamonds and finite, and women’s time as if it’s infinite like sand.”

You can kind of see the twitter post in the piece that’s the second from the top. The smallest circles are petri dishes that contain either sand or cubic zirconias.  I wanted to include this quote in the show, but that collage really doesn’t go with the work in my current solo show at Art Reach of Mid Michigan.

My first attempt was – and man, this sounds a little nuts – I glued sand over part of the old collage. Let me tell you, it did not look great. I didn’t even take a picture of it and add it to my blog post, The Lost Artworks of Elaine Luther, which is a post I wrote in 2021, when one of my artworks was “carried away by squirrels,” (allegedly) and I’ve kept updating it, every time I cut something up and rework it.

Then I moved on to the obvious solution of making a light reactive dye print of the quote, so that the piece would fit in with the rest of the show. I also, for once, selected the vintage linen I would print on, based on the canvas size that I had on hand or could buy locally, to stitch it down to for the show.  (Vs. choosing any linen that has room for the quote, and only later realizing it’s a super odd size that won’t fit on a canvas.)

Preparing to wrap a canvas with custom fabric by the artist.

Here’s the piece in the current solo show, along with a round cyanotype print.

Top piece is “Diamonds and Sand” a SolarFast Dye print, and below is a cyanotype print. Both Copyright Elaine Luther 2025.  As installed at Art Reach of Mid Michigan, August, 2025.

Time clock and stack of books at Clocking in for Unpaid Labor, solo show by Elaine Luther at Art Reach of Mid Michigan.

Fair Play is one of the books in the stack of books on a pedestal at the gallery, next to the time clock on a pedestal.