STATEMENT OF WORK

My work examines the effect of historical images on present-day narratives. As a fourth-generation seamstress, I use textiles to create collages, sculptures, and hybrid works, mining the skills taught to me by three generations of my maternal line. The material and conceptual foundation of my practice is the notion of "women's work”—of mending and making do.

My process is simple but labor-intensive: I take images of politicians, celebrities, and icons from mass-market history books and print them onto fabric; then I cut and sew the fabrics into collages and sculptures that reference classical forms of portraiture. As I transform the original flat, grainy images into soft life-size forms, I tease out themes of frailty, artifice, and the uncertainty of historical narratives. 

I work experimentally and in series: Sagging effigies constructed from cheap, glitzy fabrics subvert the prestige of cultural icons. Soft sculptures pressed between sheets of glass, like specimens on a microscope slide, serve as an allegory for the constrictions of a life lived in the public eye. Techniques like fragmentation, twisting, and stuffing evoke the pressures to which these people have been subjected, turning well-known figures into hollow signifiers inhabited by larger systems of ideology. The images, materiality, and formal structures work together to burlesque the idea that history is ontologically noble, or that its forms of representation are legitimate.