Laced

For hundreds of years, a woman’s body has been a battlefield
where cultural, scientific, and political forces have competed
for dominance over the interests of the owners of said bodies.
A woman’s body is consistently a site of constriction and
restriction, to wit, a corset squeezes the body to permanently
change its shape, while laws limit what women can do with
their own bodies. A woman’s body is thus transformed into a
matter of State, but also of cultural taste, and both imply
coercive measures and the threat of violence. There is an
inherit tension in being the owner of a woman’s body, and that
is the tension that I try to communicate with my work.

In this installation I continue my use of traditionally “female”
textile objects and techniques to explore the constrictions
imposed on a woman’s body. Tight/Laced uses sewing and
patterning to create forms that evoke corsets, themselves
devices that constrict and deform the female body, molding it
into a culturally acceptable shape. The sculptural forms are also
in dialog with one another, remaining close, yet apart. This
space is of great interest to me, since it can represent a site of
potential communication, but also a severed connection where
dialog is impossible. It is a kind of synaptic space, where there
is potential, but it must be invested in for the connection to
occur.

Like much of my work, Tight/Laced explores the notion of
vessel sculpturally, architecturally, and metaphorically. In the
patriarchal conception, a woman is a set of nested vessels: an
empty dress is filled by a woman, and a woman’s empty womb
is filled with a child. Tight/Laced is literally an empty vessel, but one that makes clear that its contents were forced into form.