February 22, 2011

Agenda no. 2 continued....

So I now where was I? Oh the posting of the image of the silk jacket... Well I will post that when I also post the response piece... But this has been one of the project occupying valuable mental realestate.

So it's complicated for many reasons, both literally and metaphorically and symbolically. The piece has a lot going on in it: lace stitches, embroidery, sequins, text ( which I never use) and it is 2D. There is some appliqué using a piece of a Chinese woman's silk jacket that I bought a a marketplace in Beijing. The motif is similar to the museum selected jacket, that piece responds in a direct way to the Han Dynasty jacket, but I inverted the design because it reminded me a lot of the kinds of stitched drawings I make when I start a piece of trapunto. It has a nice shapely look... Ahem... For the sake of some of my younger readers shall I say that it looks a lot like the curve of a woman's bottom, even reveals a little more than just a bottom... this piece of fabric that i appliqued is remarkable because of the detail and suggestiveness it already possessed. So then I decided to make it literal...adding legs and a torso (think Ghada Amer, Tracy Emin, Louise Bourgeois) and started to allow each mark respond to the next. Once the female body took shape I then had a beautiful piece of a vintage embroidered pillow.... I liked the way the flower responded to the open legs. It looks like the flower was birthed by the legs... But then the lace had to be added to obscure that... Why? Well I don't want the whole birth metaphor to be so literal. Hide it with lace, add some sexiness to it, make it feel like lingerie, or costume, or just texture... And then came the sequins... Red like a little mound of red something...dripping... But incomplete.... A needle still left in place to look like more are going to be added, maybe still under construction. And then the pockets for trapunto... Which are still not finished... This will make it feel either comfy or awkward ... Trapunto makes my work feel caught on the edge of beauty and grotesque.... I love that. And then the words.... "Its Complicated" is it a cultural reference, a reference to the complication of creating this by hand stitching, a slight reference to the complications of birth, the complications of being female, complications of life or just simple frustration? Its complicated... the words are easy to say but imply something so much larger, a longer story, something that cannot be summed up in 42 characters or a status phrase, or even a blog... Deserves dissection, discussion and response... I will post the images of both pieces when I get home tonight and you can decide.