Transcript: Objectification and movement are two major themes in this piece.
I wanted to draw a line between object and person, and through that I thought a lot about dolls and puppetry.
You know, what is a doll? What is a puppet? Why is it they resemble humans so much and yet they're lifeless? What is the point? What is the only sense that they have? What is the closest sense they have to a real-life human?
They sometimes have eyes, but they can't really see. They have a mouth, but they can't really speak. They can't really feel anything. The only thing they kind of have is movement, especially puppets with like strings pulling and whatnot. Joints are kind of the only thing they're given that serves more of a purpose than just physicality...or visibility.
With that, I wanted to emphasize joints a lot. I thought about joints while I was working on the top of the garment. I wanted to reflect [the idea] that they have the will to move, but they don't have the ability.
I also wanted the garments to reflect objects being stuck in a glass case at a dime museum. That's where the pants kind of come in as the bottom of the garment grounds the piece as a whole.
Then it has all these distressed seams and these loose threads meant to mimic the dust piling up and just time itself passing while movement is not, and kind of what that looks like [for] a garment [that is] stuck on a shelf.