The Dress / Memory and Metaphor

This is the culmination of a series produced for the ARTWALK exhibition at the Hartford Public Library, Hartford CT, March-April 2018.

The memory of a dress can trigger a visual image of someone we once were. Like an old photograph, the dress becomes a recollection of that “public persona.”

Throughout life, clothing has the ability to reflect a sense of self and the image you want to present to the world. As an artist, I have attempted to use the dress as a metaphor for the various stages of my life. In retrospect, I have chosen to recreate and reinvent who I was at a given time, with a choice of familiar or remembered “costumes”. I use the dress as sculpture, void of the figure, as a facade between my public and private self. Using very little color, the sculpture becomes ghostlike in quality – the ghosts of my former being.
Like the memory of a time and place, a dress can also stand as a metaphor of perceptions that you have had – who you once were and have become.

The work in this exhibition is a culmination of many years interpreting the various stages of a woman’s life. It is a journey to befriend all the people I once intended to be. I find by sharing my story, what is intimate becomes universal. It is not only a reflection of my past, but of the women that are inspirational components of my own life.

The show is the essence of who I am. I have included the representational sculpture that relates to each dress and is perhaps more visually understandable. It is the juxtaposition of the spirit with the reality.