Thursday, September 24, 2009
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.