How Touching

These pieces use fabrics and textures to explore connotations of touch and the untouchable, intimacy, vulnerability, and care. Their often contradictory associations of nurturance conflict with symbols of traditional authority: the stars and stripes of a colorless, disassembled flag; brass title plates borrowed from 19th century museums or specimen cases. This project was started in November 2016, when the US came face-to-face with a new relationship to authoritarianism and targeting of the vulnerable.

Fabrics, in contact with bodies, can be protection, adornment, or ritual. References to traditional female roles are encoded here: the nurturer's labor of bandage or diaper or dishtowel, the bridal attributes of white silk, the blue wool of a Catholic schoolgirl uniform. Placed against the fabrics, dried flowers carry the inescapable symbolism of sexuality.