Needlewoman Series
These dress works began as an investigation into women’s writing about needlework. I began collecting quotes from novels ranging from the 17th century to the 21st century. I was interested in this gender specific activity and how women felt about doing or not doing needlework. I choose this particular dress pattern from 1897 because the activities of this time period had a lasting ideological impact that was both liberating and oppressive for women. At the beginning of the 20th century, while the Pankhursts were marching for women’s rights and freedoms, Freud was writing on how women were inherently inferior to men and prone to hysteria often because of too much needlework! This simultaneous emergence struck me as uncanny.
These dress works progress from a literal representation of these quotes to a more abstract one where the text is present only in my understanding and manifestation of the work. Needlewoman I contains a selection of the quotes I found and the viewer is invited to read the piece like an open book, a collage of women’s voices. In Needlewoman II and III, I move away from this literal strategy to a purely visual one.
These dress works progress from a literal representation of these quotes to a more abstract one where the text is present only in my understanding and manifestation of the work. Needlewoman I contains a selection of the quotes I found and the viewer is invited to read the piece like an open book, a collage of women’s voices. In Needlewoman II and III, I move away from this literal strategy to a purely visual one.