I am making a dress. This dress is a cavity, in the shape of a cavity—of a body. It references, without resemblance, the convoluted corridor between the ear and the mouth, where so many senses and perceptions mix, lodge, pause, and exchange. This cavity contains the inner workings of the senses, not unlike the torso contains the inner workings of the organs. This cavity is a dress, a place of feeling. This space resides around me and inside of me.
Cloth as membrane. Dress as cavity. Cavity as facade.
This dress will be made from cloth remnants which I have stitched together over the past four months while writing my thesis. Some of these stitched works are small, some large, some irregularly shaped, some geometric. Some of my remnants—when stitched together—lie flat while others complicate each others edges and undulate, yielding a shadow of a curve of a body as it drapes. This dress will be a place of convergence—of bodies, of senses, of voices.
This cloth is dry and I want to lubricate it.
A remnant suggests otherness, a body gone elsewhere, the loss of a body or a people.
In my pile of remnants I grapple with the absence of bodies, working the edges of loss, edges stalled by what (is) left.
Goneness.
These edges are formed by removal—not demarcation.
Fringe is a removal of the internal framework of woven cloth, revealing structure by the absence of threads. It holds the memory of what was there, but is released from it. Fringe is evidence on the outskirts, an unruly edge establishing a frame that indicates something has left, while something still remains.
