Frances Stark's The Architect & The Housewife unfolds as a sequence of inter-related texts that consider - amongst many other things - the varying roles that gender acts out in contemporary art practice. Stark's wry, humane and often playful text, examines the inherent tensions - both emotional and social - that operate at the juncture where the private and the public meet. The text, which opens innocuously enough as a gentle riff on domesticity soon unfolds to reveal a promiscuous tangle of associations. The Architect & The Housewife indexes a bewildering, seemingly infinite range of cultural references, that includes : Oscar Wilde's The Critic as Artist, Danish 'Modern' furniture, domesticity, the studio, loneliness, consumerism, Ikea, the family, friendships, the spectacle, modernism, the avant-garde, Romanticism, architecture, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, home economics, public art, Daniel Buren, marriage, tattoos, R. M. Schindler, E.H. Gombrich and - perhaps most significantly of all - scatter cushions.

The Architect & The Housewife is printed in an edition of 1,500 copies. It has 36 pages and includes a number of Stark's own line drawings.
ISBN 1 870699 40 8, price £4.95

Designed by Secondary Modern.