As I was describing the past couple weeks of my Fellowship
to a friend, she exclaimed “My goodness you’ll never want to have a lace
wedding dress now!” And it’s true. In these last weeks everything that I have
done involves lace, from shopping for it, to cutting it, and then the tedious
task of sewing it back together.
We are using the lace for a fabric installation Veronica
wants to display in the Edgar Allan Poe House. She is manipulating the lace to
resemble a brick wall because she wants her work to simultaneously blend in
with the house’s inherent characteristics while standing out enough to offer a
sense of discovery and intrigue. The purpose of the installation is to
represent the “basement” of Poe’s mind (it will also be placed in the
basement), and to address the events in “The Black Cat.” In order to leave this
historic place undisturbed the hand-sewn veil will be hung from a tension rod.
The neatly ordered brick pattern will blend into a chaotic mess of amorphous
shapes. This will represent the unraveling of reality that Poe often acknowledged
in his writing.
Shopping for the lace was the fun part and we got lucky at
Rodeo Kid on 4th St. When we told the woman that we were buying lace
for our boss she immediately thought we were from Urban Outfitter.
Cutting the brick pattern was repetitive, but still easy
enough while we listened to Kermit’s Rainbow
Connection play in the background. As we cut the bricks we had to make sure
to use a variety of hues, from aged eggshell to mildewy beige, so that there
would be a differentiation between the “bricks.”
Sewing the lace is where it gets tricky. Lace tends to be
more holes than it is fabric, and sewing a hole to another hole is not exactly
a breeze. You are lucky if you get a piece that has a lot of floral patterning,
although chances are that “brick” will be matched with a circle design.
We still haven’t finished the fabric installation, and there
are two more bags worth of lace yet to be cut up and pieced back together, so I
really cannot wait to see what is in store for us in the next couple of weeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment