To Love and To Cherish

BFA Show spring 2015, Beasley Gallery, Northern Arizona University. Hand built unglazed porcelain and mixed media.

Women’s clothing and the stories they tell intrigue me. The role of a woman, for example as a wife, lover, or mother, does not only have personal meaning but has deep social roots. Making women’s garments out of clay gives me the opportunity to explore these roles as well as my own role as a woman.

For this show I chose to hand build a wedding dress. To me marriage is not the Happy Ever After that movies promote but a rite of passage, an initiation into what it means to be a woman in a deeply spiritual and sacred sense. The setting is the night before the celebration.

I enjoy the purity of porcelain, which is befitting for a wedding. Its properties remind me of the fragility of relationships and in a deeper sense of the preciousness of life. I left the surface unglazed and white like a fresh canvas on which a story can be written.