5.5’x5’x 2.5′, Crocheted Upcycled Fabrics with Scale and Digitally Drawn and Printed Zines; 2020-21
When do you go through your closet postpartum (X2 in my case) and decide what to keep and what to get rid of? How is this impacted by a history of eating disorders and disdain for one’s own physical form? How do you honor the clothing and the roles these items served in your life?
For me, I was tired of a space packed with items I no longer wore, which didn’t fit, or didn’t fit who I am now. But getting rid of these clothes felt like a cliff I couldn’t come back from. Some I held onto hoping to wear again, some held memories I wasn’t ready to let go of. Some were fitting, useful items that for reasons difficult to pin down, I just couldn’t wear. I pulled everything out and stacked it in piles on the floor. All the items I deemed I was ready to move on from, I processed into rag yarn (by cutting and tearing them down into strips, which I square knotted together and rolled into rag yarn balls by color). These fabrics were then used to create this crochet work.
Between the “legs” of the work rests a scale on the floor, which during installation is filled with a stack of digitally drawn zines, discussing my relationship with several of the clothing items and my own body. Viewers may take a zine, changing the weight reading on the scale, in a nod to Felix Gonzalez-Torres. They may also choose to “tare” or reset the scale as I endeavored to reset my ideas about my own body through developing a piece investigating my relationship with the collection of clothing items I found in my closet.
