“The Artifact and Living”

The collection is about the ceremony surrounding death and marriage and the symbolic rituals that define these: Procession, performance; standing on ceremony.
Where is the real living self behind the remaining cultural artifact?

The world finds fear in the stillness of death, in the inability to fathom our own end, and so we create around it, build, preserve, commemorate.

And so the collection came to be about this stasis and silence and the waxed quality of that which is no longer living, but preserved,embalmed; life veiled. The artifact and living become interchangeable.

I find intense beauty in the religious symbolism: memorabilia imprinted forever on a white porcelain stone, emotional history preserved in a vacuum, the invested cultural meanings and appropriations of certain materials and symbols.

And so I wanted to take the air out of my fabrics, and make my girl flat, and so alive in her deathliness, in a role – for what could be more astonishing than something moving but not breathing, and what could be more beautiful than preserving this intensity?