The Further the Distance, the Tighter the Knot

Linden Centre for Contemporary Art
Melbourne, Australia
October 31 - November 8, 2009

Featuring Craig Woodward on fiddle, banjo and mandolin
Project Coordinator Cheryl Adam

The Further the Distance, the Tighter the Knot was a performance installation that used Victorian mourning rituals, Old Time American folk songs and knitting to explore my longing for home as a recent transplant to Australia.

Linden is a repurposed Victorian mansion, built in the 1870s as a family home. The piece drew on Linden’s history and architecture to reflect on ideas of home, migration and memory.

I filled the exhibition spaces with hand-knit memento mori, riffing off the domestic crafts Victorian women made to memorialize loved ones (such as jewelry made from human hair) while they were sequestered in their homes during long period of mourning.


Dressed in a Victorian-inspired costume that I designed and hand knit, I led the audience on a "tour" of my installation. Playing with the convention of the didactic tour guide you might encounter at a house museum, I slipped back and forth between historic narrative on 19th-century mourning rituals and personal confessionals about my yearning for the home and garden I left behind in America and how my memories of that home were being clouded by nostalgia. Singing folk laments about lost loves and longing for home, I knit and unraveled love tokens for the audience as polite Victorian mourning customs gave way to more cathartic expressions of loss.


I was interested in how labor-intensive hair work and embroidery helped 19th-century women cope with loss and survive their forced isolation but also in how the obsessive nature of these craft projects must have driven them a bit crazy. I spent 8 months in my studio hand knitting the costume and the objects, including a 35-foot banister cozy, and found the work at turns deeply comforting and totally maddening.

During the performance, I was in a constant state of knitting and unraveling to express this contradiction.

I was also interested in how these painstaking crafts forced me to slow down and reflect on the passing of time. I wanted to audience to experience that so at one point in the piece, I spent nearly 10-minutes unraveling a 12-foot-long knitted panel to the accompaniment of a solo fiddle.

My knitted interventions in the gallery ranged from simple representational objects referencing 19th century embroidered samplers and hair work like this vintage jewelry set...



...and this period hair wreath and bouquet...


…to more psychological environments where I performed a series of gestures in real time to reflect the isolation women endured during mourning and to meditate on the passage of time and the unstable nature of memory.




The piece began with me on the balcony and the audience on the front lawn. At the end of the performance, I led them out onto the balcony.

Then, like a bad tour guide, I snuck down the fire escape and out onto the lawn, abandoning the audience on the balcony. With our positions were switched, they were trapped in the house and I was free to leave. I removed my “widow’s weeds” and exited the property singing, my mourning complete.

(Performance and installation photos: Christian Capurro)

Thank you to Project Coordinator Cheryl Adam, Knitting Assistant Jessica Price, Hannah Neeson (who knit the skirt fabric on a knitting machine) and over a dozen volunteers for their invaluable knitting contributions to this project.

Camera and editing by Anne Scott Wilson.

Womenfolk: Songs from the Valley Below

Out of Bounds: Art, Faith & Religiosity conference
Monash University, Faculty of Art & Design
Melbourne, Australia
August 22, 2008

a collaborative performance with Australian performance artist Catherine Bell

Womenfolk used folk songs passed down from Medieval times, the visual spectacle of Christian martyrdom and penance, and the sensory experience of church rituals to explore ways that contemporary utopian religious sects isolate themselves in self-sustaining communities, or "inner sanctums," in order to transcend the drudgery of daily life and secure a place in heaven.

The performance took place in a stairwell on campus, with the audience viewing the action from above, looking over the railing or through the slats of the stairs.

Photos: Andrew McLeod

Artist talk at MICA

On November 9, 2007, I gave an artist talk to Fiber students at Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, MD. I showed performance videos and discussed my process for making costumes and how I use costumes to transmit stories and ideas in performance. Concurrent with the talk, ten years worth of my costumes were exhibited in the costume gallery. The two aqua costumes on the far left and the baroque undergarments on far right front were made by costume designer Gregory Nelson.

Dress Me Slow, I'm in a Hurry

Baltimore, MD
October 25-27, 2007

Project Coordinator, Kelly Cobb
featuring Micheal Simmons on flamenco and classical guitars and mandolin

As the 2007 artist-in-residence at Evergreen, I was invited to make a site-specific work inspired by the house museum, its collection and its history. I was fascinated by Evergreen's idiosyncratic patroness Alice Garrett, who, in addition to being an esteemed art patron and high profile wife of a diplomat, sang, danced and staged lavish productions she called Songs in Costume in the 1920s in an in-home theater designed by Ballets Russes set and costume designer Leon Bakst.


As I researched Alice's archives, I discovered that while she was a consummate entertainer, Alice was not a very good singer or dancer and was deeply conflicted about her artistic aspirations. As an artist who has developed a performance form based on my passion for the music, obsession with costumes and an untrained stage persona (rather than undisputed vocal talent and acting skills), I felt a powerful affinity with Alice and developed the piece around our similarities and differences. Dress Me Slow was my own version of Songs in Costume. I sang songs drawn from Alice's repertoire of Irish an Spanish folk songs; wore costumes I designed and handmade inspired by the intensely colored costumes Bakst created for Alice; and shared monologues exploring Alice's conflicted artistic aspirations and my own ambivalence as a artist.

Throughout the piece, I was in a constant state of changing from one costume to another as a metaphor for the multiple identities that Alice navigated in her life—ambassadress, socialite, social reformer, art patron and performer.

IRISH COSTUME:
The Irish costume was inspired by the Irish selkie, or mermaid. The belt suggests the ubiquitous Irish seaweed, with the brown i-cords on the belt, around my neck and in my hair referencing the ropey kind of seaweed. The "gloves" riff off cable-knit Irish fishermen sweaters.


Knit head-to-toe without a pattern, the costume is an exploration in increasing and decreasing stitches to create the bell-like bottom of the dress and gloves and the curling tendrils of the seaweed belt.

SPANISH COSTUME:

The Spanish costume is a traditional flamenco dress rendered in a confection of red, purple and hot pink. It was inspired by a painting in the house by Miguel Covarrubias depicting Alice dancing the flamenco and a photo of Baltimore opera singer Rosa Ponsel as Carmen.


The ruffles were hand dyed before construction and the bodice was hand painted (see process shots below). Kelly Cobb, Instructor in the Fiber Department at MICA and project coordinator for Dress Me Slow, taught me gradation dye techniques to achieve the fade effect. Kelly dyed the embroidery floss and bias tape to my specifications and I embroidered the lyrics of one of the songs I sang on the ruffles. I hand painted fabric for the flowers, which were constructed by a group of friends at a flower-making party. Kelly designed and constructed the wig.

EXOTIC COSTUME:

The Exotic costume was inspired by Leon Bakst’s boldly colored, wildly patterned designs for the Ballets Russes.

Under the guidance of Kelly Cobb, I designed the fabric from drawings I made of plants and birds while walking the grounds of Evergreen during the magic hour each evening. Kelly taught me how to hand paint the designs onto silk for the harem pants and Turkish vest (see process shots below). MICA Fiber student Hanna Brancato screen printed the sheer scarf as well as a theatrical backdrop in the design. All scarves were hand dyed.


(Photos: Aaron Igler)

PROCESS SHOTS:
Gradation dyeing the Spanish costume

Silk painting fabric for Exotic costume


(photos: Kelly Cobb)

Dress Me Slow, I'm in a Hurry (video excerpt)

Lament

Institute of Contemporary Art Soft Sites exhibition at Bartram's Garden
Philadelphia, PA
July 31, 2006

Made in collaboration with Katie Holten, Lament took the audience on a tour of an 18th century botanic garden to explore the extinction of plants and our loss at their disappearance.


I led the audience through the garden, telling stories about plants that vanished either because they couldn't survive in the the wild or because they fell out of fashion and people stopped planting them.


Dropping seeds like Hansel and Gretel, I led the audience into a wooded glen, where I sang a lament at the rivers edge. Then I paddled away in a canoe and disappeared.


Lament drew on the Victorian language of flowers--a means of communicating through coded messages that allowed people to express feelings they were not free to speak aloud. I shared the symbolic meanings of flowers in Bartram's garden and embroidered them on my costume.

I wanted to make something that could live on after the performance. Using the same blue floss and white linen of the costume, I embroidered some stories I told in performance and made a book with photos from the performance and the embroideries. The embroideries were inspired by Victorian handkerchiefs, on which women often stitched secret messages for their beloved, and by vintage needlework samplers, which feature blocks of inspirational text or sage advice. Victorian women sewed samplers to record life events, rites of passage or life history. My embroideries record the loss of flowers.

The embroideries were shown at Fleisher-Ollman Gallery in Philadelphia in September 2007 on the occasion of the book release. http://www.fleisher-ollmangallery.com/news.php

Photos: Aaron Igler