Look closely please, upcycled clothing, hand embroidery with hand spun naturally dyed wool, cyanotype prints, 2023.

This is a piece I made for an exhibition my friend curated called Arts of War: Heart's of War, which involved a sort of performance in which I stood in the center of the room and disrobed to reveal messages on my clothing for the audience to try to read. In doing this I was trying to acknowledge the challenges of communication. Communicating oneself can often feel like a battle, at least in my experience. The need be known by others, to articulate my ideas, express my needs, these needs cause me a lot of distress but they are needs nonetheless. Communicating such things requires vulnerability, and often involves akward stutterings and unsatisfactory choices of word. What's more it feels as though such needs demand I know exactly what it is I want to communicate, despite the fact that I am a wonderufully incomplete, forgetful, confused and curious creature.

The hand-embroiedered messages and cyanotype printed images are not easy to make out, and in presenting this work on my body to viewers in a gallery context, I invite them to step into discomfort and "look closely please." To me this exxagerates the difficulties of communication to make them more apparent, and in doing so open up space for empathy and connection in the gallery and challenges the standard assumed relationship between the "art object" and the "viewer." In order for the viewers to read the messages or make out the images, they must engage in a sort of social interaction with me, and they must put themselves in the vulnerable position of looking closely at my body, even lifting parts of my clothing. Of course, viewers were not required to approach me, just as we do not always have to try to know or be known.

A note about materials: The yarn is hand spun (by yours truly) wool from a local sheep and it is natural dyed with quebracho dye. The cyantoype images (negative reliefs made with the power of the sun and cyanotype science!) are a mix of photographic negatives and physical objects placed directly on top of the fabric and removed once the solar process has done its thing. The photographs are of my apartment and the objects are things in my apartment, such as a toothbrush or a childhood toy. The domestic theme of the cyanotype subject matter is intentional and reiterates the idea of a private, unknowable, but deeply important world that we all carry with us, hoping others will be willing to take the leap of faith and try to imagine what it all means.

During the performance I had post cards that had the images you see above on one side and on the other side more clearly written versions of the embroidered messages. This way, if people wanted to engage with me and the work, but weren't comfortable getting too close to my body, they could look at the post cards instead. Viewers were also able incorporate their response into the work by writing on the back of the post cards. The box the cards were held in was used by my mom when she was in college to store her recipes, and it served as a comforting anchor for me during this slightly anxiety-inducing performance.

Thanks for looking!