Hannah Gartside O (2021) found tulle, found 1930s dress and silk ribbon, found silk fabrics, silk organza, leather offcuts, thread, brass rod, timber dowel rod, 320cm (H) x 229cm (W) x 211cm (D)
In dressmaking to sew is to connect, to transform flat planes of cloth into three-dimensional shapes via tiny loops of thread. In my sculptures, when I use clothes --
old clothes -- I am referring of course to the absent body which once inhabited that garment. There are always indexical marks left from the wearer: faint period blood stains near the crotch of a nightie, a waft of floral perfume, creases in the elbow of a blouse… in the case of the 1930s black lace dress in O, rents in the lace, some clumsily mended with black thread, distorting the pattern of flowers rendered in the fabric. In my sculptures I use ‘women’s clothes’; it’s femme presenting bodies that I speak of and imagine. What were these people’s lives like? What were her pleasures and her trials?
O is an imagined late-night-post-party tryst/seduction scene: a consensual, bawdy, joyous upskirt moment. The black lace dancing dress has been inverted, and stretched taut, creating a vortex/ funnel, which in shape also references a megaphone. Lusty and licentious, the sculpture is an abstracted example of active femme pleasure that rubs in the face of a contemporary news media landscape that presents and reports on women’s bodies more often than not (and particularly recently) as sites of pain and subjugation. In The Argonauts (2015), Maggie Nelson writes “to be femme is to give honour where there has been shame”.
O reflects a contemporary expression of agency, pleasure, and personhood.
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Notes: This is my offering to the canon of femme presentations that revel in their pleasure and corporality. Give me examples of women’s pleasure and agency or so help me I will make them myself!