“Philosophy of the Home” is a research and sculpture collaboration between multidisciplinary artist Laura Dzelzytė and the Department of Culture and Dzongkha Development. Laura explores the idea of the woman at home in Bhutan as a knowledge system by documenting Bhutanese domesticity and reimagining objects and fragments of architecture in wax. In the process she challenges the historical alignment of knowledge and rationality with masculine, institutional spaces and repositions women’s domestic labour as an alternative embodiment of knowledge. 

In parts of Bhutan, land, property, and household authority traditionally pass through the female line from mother to eldest daughter. Scholars of the Himalayan region including Mona Schrempf have noted that ritual and domestic authority in many Bhutanese communities is deeply gendered in ways distinct from Western histories, where domesticity often grants virtue but rarely power. In Bhutan, the home gives women control over material continuity, ritual life, and the rhythms of time itself. The traditional Bhutanese house thus becomes an epistemic structure, a living archive through which women carry identity across generations.
 

Philosophy of the Home is anchored in Italian philosopher Emilio Coccia’s premise that the home is the epitome of moral reality. It challenges what Audre Lorde called the “European mode” of knowledge, where ideas are valued only for their problem-solving and economically productive capacity. “Philosophy of the Home” in Bhutan reveals an alternative epistemology grounded in self-worth, self-knowledge, and care for others’ dignity. A mode of knowing that thrives precisely in the spaces formal institutions tend to ignore: the home, the community, the body.

The project consists of an anthropological study developed through extended stays with Bhutanese families, visiting nunneries, and participating in rituals of domesticity and prayer. This research informs articles, events and a documentary, edited by a Bhutanese cinematographer, as well as a series of large-scale wax sculptures in which the artist reimagines everyday objects and architecture, culminating in the replication of a traditional house in Nobgang. Wax functions as a metaphor for an alternative mode of knowing: knowledge that is ephemeral, tactile, provisional, and sustained through embodied practice.

 

Laura is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. She studied at the University of Cambridge and received an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2025. She works across painting, sculpture, drawing, conceptual publishing, and immersive installations to investigate what it is to be human now. In her wax sculpture series, Laura reimagines typically wooden artifacts (a Puglian bed, a Victorian bench, a Jesuit library door, a Bhutanese heritage window), to explore material transformation and the relationship between object and memory.