Statement
My current work uses bra-making materials to reform and recontextualize the aesthetics of these materials and their inherent assumptions. These materials are heavily associated with “unmentionables,” garments which are intimate and usually unseen, worn under more acceptable clothing. I am exploring an aesthetic of the tangible qualities of these substances: their stretch, their shine, their color, and the warping, molding, or other structure they reveal when combined in new ways. I create fabrics from elastics stitched together, and allow wires, boning, and channeling to dictate shapes for the textile around them, rather than to conform fabric to externally determined body shapes.
I view the labor and actions of making these pieces as a performance of reclaiming and reimagining heretofore externally determined, corporatized, generic standards of beauty, femininity, and shape that have been foisted on women and then presumed to be intimate and hidden. I use these materials to shape and delineate space through tension, compression, and framing as a semblance of forces shaping decisions in women’s lives. Materials that mold prescribed female forms are removed from bodies and employed in exhibition spaces to instead shape the wall and the aesthetic arena. Meanwhile, the female form is absent from the site, inverting the legacy of venerating the canonized female figure that excludes women creators from the dialogue. The adaptable, flexible, off-kilter nature of the individual pieces reflects acts of absorbing and contorting. The fluctuating bodily experience of a mother navigates between the physical havoc of childbearing/rearing and a recovered femininity. These pieces explore the aesthetics of reclaiming ownership and the performance of display. The adjustable hardware, modular attachments, straps placed in tension, forms stretched, and materials twisted and drooped are analogous to ways that women, mothers, and their bodies interrelate. Personal associations, cultural impositions, and political implications are held in tension, these networks pulled, stretched, and stitched into one aesthetic presentation that points to womanhood, motherhood, and a tenuous architecture of experiences rather than human form.
I further explore a connection between lingerie and cathedrals and churches. Archetypal architectural features of religious buildings, such as pointed arches and groin vault ceilings, visually echo not only feminine curves, but bra construction specifically. The prevalence of stained glass encourages visual associations to lace and embroidered tulle so predominant in women’s clothing. The forms rhyme with religious architecture where polarized portrayals of women in churches and cathedrals apportion the feminine into either the humble, revered, and unattainable saint or the culpable temptress. The gap between these two female portrayals in religious art is the actual place of the human, leaving the representation of women in so much religious imagery a deformation. I am especially interested in concepts of sanctuary: mothers as emotional sanctuary, religious buildings as physical or spiritual sanctuary, shelters, sanctuary cities, refugee housing. I build tents from bra-making materials that echo elements of cathedral buildings within the form of portable dwellings.