I think of
clothing as a shell or vessel into which we pour our bodies every
day.
Clothing functions as a barrier between our
bodies and the physical world our bodies move through, interact with,
and adapt
to. Clothing can represent our culture,
our traditions, our climate, our economic latitude, and even our
obsessions.
Originally, these dresses were probably made by women and then bought by other women who wore them for celebratory purposes such as the major milestone of marriage or perhaps festivities marking a significant time period in the development of a woman. Here I explore the three-way confluence of history, culture, and physical matter. The dresses are a kind of testament to this confluence, and the question of how this confluence is framed hangs in the air much like the dresses on the branches and the printed words above them.
My process involves a kind of
burying ritual. Each clothing vessel is
layered and washed over many times with pigment and other materials
such as
wood chips, sand, soil, dried vegetation, cement, lipstick, Vaseline,
safety
pins, q-tips, and hair. The altered
state of each dress and the collaged word pinned above it, such as
blood or
honey, evoke pre-scientific ideas about the basic elements of physical
matter
within us or within our environment. The
title of each dress dialogues with the collaged word offering further
insight
into how the work is framed conceptually: Eggshell (body), Collateral
(blood),
Birth (water), Slippery Slope (soil), Chaste (fire), Eve and Song
(salt),
Pollynation (honey), I Scream Neapolitan (milk), and Under-tiered
(bone).
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