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