where moth and rust doth corrupt

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth where moth and rust doth corrupt

Matthew 6:19

Admonitions against ostentation infiltrate nearly every creed and culture, whereby the

preoccupation with ornamentation may be perceived as innately human. Both evidence

of progress and materialistic lust, the ornamental object exists as that which is tainted

and that which is revered.

Simultaneously likened to stains upon the purity of the technical process, and intricate

indications of human dexterity and ingenuity, the decorative textile motif harbors

within its woven fibers complex perceptions of the decorative as effeminate, vain, and

commodity fetishistic.

Relegated to the interior and valued predominantly for the attractiveness of her

corporeal form, the woman as a patriarchal construct produced objects of adornment

as a narcissistic endeavor, whereby the increased ornamentation of such objects

enhanced the bodily surface, while providing pleasure to the maker knowing that her

production was intended to beautify. A form of maquillage, the textile in the

manifestation of lace, suggests the masquerade and the carnivalesque through the act

of adorning, but also through the complexity of the process as burdened with fine

conglomerated detail. Denigrated as a means of sustaining male superiority, female

textile production and the ornamentation endemic of that production were regarded as

negative and decadent, as the effeminate was charged with being fixated with the

increasingly detailed as a result of excess time directed toward the “excessive”. The

feminine was seen, then, as parasitic and ancillary to the male, busied with artificiality.

The purity of white silk stained by time and weathered by its inherent perishability, my

work exists suspended in a state of simultaneous degradation and fusion, whereby the

ornamental motif is anthropomorphicized assuming an organic character. The female

attention to detail is present, yet an overarching evocation of absence pervades. Placed

behind glass, the pin-centric design assumes the guise of the specimen – the vanitas

comingling with the pseudoscientific.