I applied one last time for the Jerome Fiber Artist Project Grant for emerging artists...and I got it!
The "Barbies" are samples of how the project might look
Here's the project:
WEARING MY AGE
“Power consists to a large extent
in deciding what stories are told” Carolyn
Heilbrun
Women
have been telling their stories through needlework for generation upon
generation. Within the traditional
forms of dress and decorative stitching there is often a secret, hidden
language of the oppressed. In this project, I will make the public, private and
secret stories of contemporary women manifest in computer assisted machine
embroidered clothing.
We often
think of embroidery as the delicate work of girls and women of the leisure
class. We think of samplers,
delicately stitched hankies, linens for bed and table. We might also think of
traditional designs on traditional ethnic costumes, identifying tribe and
region. Embroidery seems to us a beautiful frippery.
But embroidery has deep
narrative and subversive roots. Histories, mythologies and secrets have been
told in stitch. The Bayeux Tapestries documented the Battle of Hastings, 1066,
from the political point of view of the victors, in over 200 feet of
embroidery. Mary, Queen of Scots, and her court, prevented from displaying
their education, developed a coded language of stitch to communicate. Hmong
story cloth tells both traditional stories in stitch as well as the harrowing
stories of escape and emigration to America. Sujani quilts from India
traditionally convey a mother’s dream for the long life of her newborn, but
also tell the stories of women: birth, death, abuse, and infanticide. These are all political, the testimony
of a largely silent, culturally oppressed group throughout history.
I use
the techniques of embroidery, both hand and machine aided, as drawing and
painting tools, laden with history and expectations that can be exploited for
startling new expressions.
I have
been engaged with free-motion machine embroidery as drawing for several years
and now want to expand that engagement through original design in computer
aided machine embroidery. I will
develop complex alphabets and images that will facilitate recognition of the
political underpinnings of embroidery, clothing and fashion.
As an artist,
my overarching goal is to elevate “women’s” traditional crafts, and
specifically the craft of embroidery, to fine art practice. I will use updated
techniques of the historically oppressed to comment on the continuing oppression of
women in my world, the
first world, a shifting landscape, certainly, but still worthy of
investigation. The goal of my
project is to tell women’s stories in clothing that can be described as
artwear, walking sculpture, or performance art. To do this, I will learn to
digitize original embroidery designs and use my computer assisted embroidery
machine to create narrative content in textiles that I will then use to create
original clothing.
The project that I plan to create
is titled WEARING MY
AGE. It is a series of up to four costumes
from hand dyed, variably distressed muslin, that will function as narrative
uniforms demonstrating the public, private and secret language of women at
distinct stages of life through the use of original text and image. Each uniform will be comprised of a
jacket (public language), a dress (private language) and a petticoat (secret
language). Each part of the uniforms
will have text embroidered on the fabric, expressing the experience of women at
various ages.
The text for the clothing will
be written based on interviews with a national group of female artists and
creatives, collected using email and social media, about the stages and ages of
being a woman. The answers will be edited and digitized into machine
embroidery. The digital software,
Tru Embroidery, for MAC, will allow me to develop images and typefaces that I
will be able to import into the Baby Lock embroidery machine.
