Shiff’s ancestors, particularly on her paternal mother’s side, all worked in the needle trade (the garment industry) when they immigrated to America from Poland in the 1920s. A significant proportion of immigrant Jews in the United States, particularly in cities like New York, were employed in this industry. 

 

Shiff wanted to pay tribute to the hard labour her ancestors had undertook in order to survive. It was low paying work, even though the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union had been established in 1900. The factories in which they worked were known as sweatshops. Within these sweatshops individuals had to endure inhumane conditions. 

 

Shiff’s thesis project required her to use a found object. Her sculpture class at The Museum School made a trip to the Singer sewing factory in Lowell, Massachusetts, which was still in operation. The factory used hundreds of automated looms, which meant that each sewing machine could act independently without the need for an individual to operate it. At this factory, one room was piled with hundreds of chairs on offer to give away, so Shiff took a few of these chairs all with the name Singer printed on the back of each wooden seat. 

 

To create her piece, Shiff put a motor onto one of these chairs to make it spin. She welded eighteen three foot tall needles out of steel and thread these needles with large surges (spools) of white and red thread that sat on the ground. She wound the thread around the chair and then let the chair do its work; it accumulated the thread around its body as it spun. The chair got heavier and heavier as it collected more and more thread, and the added weight made the chair rock back and forth, which animated it. The heavier the chair got, the slower it turned until, finally, it could labour no more, and came to a complete halt. 

 

The needles surrounding the chair served as a metaphorical cage which referenced the cage that many women found themselves in with respect to low-paying, hard work that seemed to imprison them. Shiff enclosed the chair, its needles and thread into a room that each visitor had to enter. Shiff then cast a shadow onto the back wall so that the shadow of the chair and needles appeared larger than life. While the chair spun, it began to form what looked like the belly of a pregnant woman. 

 

Thus, the appearance of the chair’s shadow doubled the meaning of the word labour: women’s labour through their work and the labour of child birth. In this way, the Pink Ghetto installation was born.