Seams-Sew Ordinary. We thought we knew, and then suddenly the hidden truth is ripped open at the seams, and an extraordinary secret is revealed.
Seams-Sew Ordinary is an installation that aims to piece together the buried narrative of my grandmother’s life. Three larger-than-life (8 feet high) dress forms stand in for the missing pieces of my grandmother’s past. They function as uniforms from a more socially restrictive time and place (which hopefully remains behind us). Two dresses, color-coded red and black, hang inverted in the gallery, representing a life turned upside down and concealed. The white third dress stands upright in front of the others, signifying childhood or a simpler and more innocent time. The three dresses fit together like puzzle pieces forming a more complete picture of her story. Through a fading view of the past the installation attempts more than anything else to reconstruct an emotional history.
A family’s absent memory is created in Seams-Sew Ordinary. At age 93, my grandmother passed away still holding a family secret - the birth of a baby boy - and within her a notion of shame that I will never completely fathom. My mother had always thought she was an only child, and then soon after my grandmother’s death, her oldest child, my mother’s older brother, bared the story of his birth thirteen years before my mother’s.
She was a skilled seamstress, sewing her own garments, and sewing her stories closed. There was no sign of her pain; she had sewn that part of her life shut. Fragments of her hidden story have been pieced together through video. A montage of photographs, text and collected objects pave a psychological as well as physical path between my grandmother’s childhood home and her adult life. The action of sewing is an ordinary act, but within this context it is something more.
She was a collector of the ordinary. No one suspected that she kept such an extraordinary secret.
Special Thanks:
Project Support: Theo Davis, Michelle Majeski and Kristin Wessel
Technical Installation Support: Rick, Lani, Israel and Zack
Financial Support: Suzanne and Herbert Siegel
University of Washington Tacoma