Custodian of Memory: The Dress as Autobiography

Custodian of Memory: The Dress as Autobiography

 

                                      We shall not cease from exploration

                                      and the end of all our exploring

                                      will be to arrive where we started

                                      and know the place for the first time.

          – T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

 

For me, as with most women, the dress is a complicated garment. What is it about the dress? Current popular culture includes a film called “27 Dresses.” “The Wedding Dress” is a compilation of essays on the bookstore shelves. Breathless pictorial reports from New York and Milan about next season’s dress styles are delivered daily. For me, the dress is many things. It has been a fantasy, a make-believe device, and a way to escape my reality as a child in a tumultuous environment. As a young adolescent I had only one dress. As a teenager I learned to sew and made all my own clothing. After I was married, I made all of my children’s clothing as well as clothing for my widowed mother. How well I remember the glee when I completed an outfit made from “on sale” fabric. Later in life, when I was working, I had no time to sew and was able to afford to buy whatever I wanted but I lost touch with the changes in the shape of my body because I no longer needed to fit the cloth to it.

What has remained constant throughout my life has been my overwhelming sense of wonder whether I’m seeing fashion on the runway at a Pierre Balmain show in Paris in 1969 or viewing Renaissance art mixed with modern design during my Florence study year in 2004-5. As I researched this essay I realized the truth of Carl Jung’s theory about the collective unconscious because my art had been informed by similar incidents in the lives of far more famous female artists.

When we moved a year ago, goods were delivered from storage and I saw some of my things for the first time in more than three years. As I organized my clothing, I realized that I had saved more than half a dozen dresses that were markers of important occasions in my life: baptism, first formal, and graduation from teacher’s college. About the same time, I read a comment by Cornelia Parker in an essay published in 1990[1] about “taking something you know to explore the things you don’t.” I realized that the assemblage defined me – my sewing ability, the joy I feel when I take something old and make it new, the pleasure that comes when I look at something familiar through fresh eyes.

As I took Cornelia Parker’s remark to heart, I realized that the memories of these dresses had already begun to weave their way into my life. During my studies in the Florence Program in 2004-2005, I had made three wire dress sculptures. The first reflected not only my past but also the future because it was made during October as I awaited word on the birth of our first grandchild. I named the dress after Molly and brought it home as a Christmas gift that December. I saw the dress as something that would tell Molly who I was as she grew up with the wire sculpture hanging in her bedroom.

That initial sculpture led to many variations on the dress theme including other sculptures in wire, nylon, papier mache, a maquette in a mirrored box, and a life-size Barbie trunk that spoke of the insecurities we women share. At one point, when my entire body of work was displayed in our apartment, the landlord brought through a trio of Italian women representing three generations. From their comments I realized I had been able to communicate my ideas about fantasy across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Because of the multiple meanings that can be attributed to the dress, many artists have used the dress as a metaphor. In 1881 Edgar Degas created The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer using wax and mixed media of hair, silk, tulle and gauze for the skirt and slippers, thereby liberating sculptural practices used since antiquity. Early in the twentieth century, artists began using art-making techniques they applied to the dress. Sonia Delaunay, a Russian painter and printmaker living in Paris, used collage techniques in the 1920s to create the unlikely marriage of her “simultaneous materials” of taffeta, flannel and organdy thereby revolutionizing the fashion world with a successful clothing line based on her designs. From applying the techniques of art-making in dress construction, the dress itself became the subject with an embedded message. Christo’s Wedding Dress (1967) with its ropes tying the bride to a massive, wrapped bundle she must drag, offers comment on the social and psychological implications of marriage. As the eighteenth century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau has said:

                                               What one is

                                               is nothing

                                               What one seems to be

                                               is everything.

 

Our persona is created through our clothing choices representing not just a shell but also our cultural identity, which is further informed by sexual, social and performatory role-playing influences. Art historian Anne Hollander in “Seeing Through Clothes,” states that clothes don’t make the individual but the image of the individual, not lifeless effigies but vital representations. Only by looking at the history of the dress as a part of the history of art and as an art in itself can we account for the actual look of what makes the dress so potent an image. Hollander feels the phenomenon of dress can evoke a great deal of emotional and aesthetic work that goes beyond immediate social and political facts.

Nowhere does the dress play a role more than in the work of Louise Bourgeois, often referred to as the mother of contemporary female art. Bourgeois was deeply hurt during her childhood when her father brought his young English mistress, Sadie, into the family home in France where she resided for ten years with his wife’s tacit agreement. Bourgeois’s mother sewed tapestries and, since much of her work was destined for the more puritanical American market, she had to cut out the genitals of the nudes and then replace the missing body parts with flowers or leaves. Her mother made Bourgeois a quilt using the censored genitalia.

According to Bourgeois, her sculptures are a way of dealing with her feelings based on her past that was filled with deceit, betrayal, jealousy and hypocrisy as well as her need to repair herself.[2] Bourgeois has called her art “an exorcism of the past, to see the past in realistic proportion … to be active, take control, to be alive here and today.”[3] Bourgeois believes that the artist remains a child who is no longer innocent yet neither can she shake the bonds of the past or liberate herself from the unconscious.[4] In 1992 Bourgeois created Precious Liquids by draping a long black coat around an embroidered cushion, thereby suggesting a protective father figure. Bourgeois embellished the handkerchiefs from her wedding trousseau with drawing and stitching, then hung them on Poles, her metallic trees, along with her linen, slips, dresses, coats, overalls and underwear. On one Pole she attached an animal’s tail to a red dress, implying “cat woman,” both the feminine and feline.

Dresses have also been used by Canadian artist and OCAD instructor Cathy Daley who has used pastels on vellum to evoke mystery with its smooth and translucent nature. Her Untitled (1996) sheath conveys an ample form and suggests a fleshy voluptuousness. While the two dresses depicted in Untitled (1999) are reminiscent of the Renaissance because of the size of the skirt and yet they have no waist.

Daley’s iconography emphasizes the sensuality of the “perfect” female form. The unbelievably thin silhouette of Little Black Dress of 1997 signifies the anorexic elegance contemporary Western society has come to accept as the epitome of beauty. The absence of the body in Daley’s drawings gives us a feeling of helplessness because of the impossibility of possessing such an emaciated, androgynous body where skinny is equated with splendor, leaving one unable to please or to find our own happiness.

When the time came to start my thesis project in 2007-2008, the creative use of the dress by other artists as well as my own natural progression led me to “Custodian of Memory: The Dress as Autobiography.” During the fall term, I sought to address my characteristics and those of other women – our femininity, our fantasy, our fun. I produced a series of large charcoal drawings of the dress and had just begun work on an illustrated children’s book – again to tell Molly who I was.

What started out as one thing then became another when I was diagnosed in November with colon cancer. I realized the reason for all that I had been working on during the previous three years was not only to say something about who I was as a woman and an artist, but also that the dress could be turned into an icon for an important new message. On the very morning of the diagnosis, a page one headline in The Globe and Mail declared, “Sex and age affect access to critical care.” The article cited stark statistics that showed women receive much poorer medical treatment than men. The research, first published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, said the disparity was even more pronounced for older women and noted that this was the latest in a long line of studies showing that women get less than optimal care for serious illnesses. “I don’t want people reading this material to think that physicians are all sexist pigs,” said Nancy Baxter of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. “We want to ensure that women and men have equal access to care, but our subconscious biases are an impediment.”[5]

I was conspicuous evidence of just such a bias. My husband and I had gone to the same doctor for more than thirty-five years. Rod had several colonoscopies, the definitive test for early detection of polyps in the colon before they become cancerous. I’d never had a colonoscopy. While my breasts had been well examined our waste is not as sexy as our breasts. We don’t talk about the process of elimination! When our doctor retired, a new doctor took us on. During my first physical, I complained of a gnaw in my side. He immediately ordered several tests, including a colonoscopy, which found a two-inch tumor that had been growing inside me for some time.

Before the second term began I decided that I wanted to use the dress and my art to warn women about this silent killer, Colon cancer is the third biggest killer of women, a foe that is little understood, and one that all too often goes undetected in women because men are more likely to be tested, even though the disease strikes both sexes equally. In my case, surgery was successful, but the cancer had spread to my lungs. I decided to tell the next chapter in the story of the dress; an unseen, guiding hand had been showing me the way.

Prior to my surgery in December I wrote a message for cards I mailed in January asking my female family members and friends to share with me the memory of their favorite dress. Little did I realize how much joy I would receive as the letters began to pour in during my recuperation. It had been my intention to turn a negative into a positive, raise awareness about colon cancer, and nudge women to have a colonoscopy, but I now realize that I have set in motion so much more. These letters to me have been a gift of the writers’ time, a commodity in short supply in this fast-paced world. Many are hand-written, hearkening back to a time when that was the commonplace form of communication.

I have created a collective for “The Dress as Autobiography.” Moreover, the happiness expressed has been universal. Is it the memories, the nostalgia, of a moment in time that cannot be repeated but can be remembered with such pleasure? Is it the recollection of the act of making, the use of the hands, often with help from a mother? Is it the creativity to foster a type of theatre? Is it the act of human kindness, helping one another – in this case, me?

Some of the letters about favorite dresses evoke a different time and place. Menna Weese grew up in Wales where each day of the week was set aside for particular household duties. Saturday was meant for baking and her mother wanted the house to herself so sent Menna to her Aunt Decima who was a dressmaker. “I treadled away happily on an old piece of cloth,” said Menna. “I learned to sew and also heard a lot of gossip.” Menna still spends time with her aunt, now 89, and they talk about fashion, what’s in and what’s out.

During the Second World War Carol Barrett worked as a “Farmerette” in the Niagara Peninsula picking fruit along with other young women from the cities because so many men were away at war. There was camaraderie among the participants and much support for her as she came second in the 1945 Miss Farmerette beauty pageant. “For me, that dress and that evening were one of the highlights of my young life,” she said.

How a particular dress makes a women feel was a theme that ran throughout the letters. For many women, their favorite dress gave them confidence. When Mary Lou Carter’s mother made her a mauve organdy dress, “All the nervous anticipation of the upcoming piano recital melted away. When I think of that dress I still remember the confidence that it gave me fifty-six years ago.” For Carey Roberts, newly divorced at 50, a short red leather skirt and black boots represented “the sexiest time in my life.” Sexy was also how Cathy Fauquier felt in a petal-like layered chiffon evening dress that she wore in St. Tropez. “It felt as if I had nothing on. Oh, to be 22 again.”

Other women felt like royalty in their favorite dress. “I truly felt like a princess,” wrote Elizabeth Illingworth. “I wore ‘The Little Green Dress’ many times and always felt like a queen,” said Eileen Ebin. At 18, Elaine Hutchinson’s winter white taffeta outfit made her feel like a princess. “When I looked in the mirror, I saw a princess looking back. At the dance on Saturday evening I was fortunate enough to be crowned ‘Queen’.”

The favorite dress also meant special connections to mothers. “My mother helped me with the hand sewing and showed me how to make a sash out of the leftover silk,” said Heather Erskine in describing the dress she wore to a prom with the man she married a year later. “That was the last time my Mom and I had such an experience. We moved to Indiana immediately after being married and Mom got very sick shortly thereafter.” “I can hardly think of a time when my Mother has not been involved in helping me to get ready for a special occasion,” wrote my daughter Alison. Speaking of a fuscia taffeta floor-length dress that I made for her when she was an undergraduate at McGill, Alison said, “I have a group photograph from that night and I look quite confident striking a pose in that stunning dress. Eighteen years later I still have the dress.”

In addition to assembling these letters, I have also been working on new interpretations of the dress. When I began cutting into my drawings of my dresses, I realized that the act represented the gouge I had in my abdomen after surgery. While my story is personal, it is also universal, because “the audience is listening” just like the “listening choir” conducted by Ann Hamilton during last year’s Nuit Blanche. Having shared in that collective experience, I now realize that I have unwittingly created a collective experience of women helping women, women helping me.

Perhaps no better answer to the mystery and complexity of the dress comes from Hungarian novelist György Konrád, who asked “Where is home?” The answer, according to one reviewer of his memoir, A Guest in My Own Country, is “Memory is home.”[6] Whether women are creative artists, thriving in the workplace, or stay-at-home Moms, home is what matters most. If memory is home, memories of dresses past and hopes for dresses future, are sure to be an important part of what both completes and complicates me and many other women.

 

Annotated Bibliography

Amesbury, Barbara, editor. Survivors in Search of a Voice: The Art of Courage. Toronto: Woodlawn Arts Foundation, January 1995.

This book, which focuses on breast cancer, combines the work of artists interpreting breast cancer with recollections of women who have suffered from the disease. Among the works is a dress by textile artist Margot Fagan who was inspired by a story she heard about a surgeon who grew up in a Mennonite community where she learned to make quilts. As a result, the scars on women’s chests due to the surgeon’s stitchery are said to be works of art in themselves.

 

Baas, Jacquelynn and Mary Jane Jacob, editors. Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

This book is also about time, the time taken by fifty colleagues who met quarterly for two years to focus on Buddhist practice and the arts. For me, the result is a wonderful collection of essays that offered sage advice about quiet contemplation, opening yourself up to limitless possibilities, and the impact such freedom of self can have on creativity. The book showed me how intuition is an inner knowledge that has guided me this past year.

 

Bernadac, Marie-Laure & Hans-Ulrich Obrist, editors. Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father – Reconstruction of the Father – Writings and Interviews 1923-1997. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.

While researching the life of Louise Bourgeois I was surprised to find similarities with my own life, specifically the parallel relationship my father had with another woman. When I was sixteen I came home one summer afternoon to find my father outside under a willow tree with a woman wearing a bikini. Knowing that my mother was attending a funeral and no one else was at home I immediately asked my father how he expected to teach us the difference between right and wrong if he offered us an example of conduct such as this with a woman “dressed like that.”

I locked myself in my bedroom until my mother returned. The so-called friend never darkened our door again but it was only years later when I realized that my father’s affair had been going on since I was five. I wonder: do we all seek solace from our past in our art?

 

Fortin, Jocelyne. Le vêtement comme envoutement: Cathy Daley. Musée Régional de Rimouski, 2000.

Daley’s drawings of breasts and long, long legs are emphasized in Untitled (1996) a long sheath evoking Barbie and the idealized body with her full breasts, tapered waist, well-defined hips and long legs. The absence of a body in her delicately executed drawings of female apparel provides a source of reflected light that hints at something else.

 

Gouma-Peterson, Thalia. Miriam Schapiro: Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life. New York, Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1999.

In 1966 when Miriam Schapiro read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, her life and art was dramatically affected by the struggles of the book’s protagonist, Anna, a writer who was also a mother, lover and friend. For Schapiro, as for me, the relevant lesson of the fourth and final notebook – the golden notebook – was that Lessing’s novel might in fact be read as an autobiography. In other words, Lessing’s life was just as complicated as Schapiro’s as both tried to unify their many identities. When I read that and studied Schapiro’s art, I realized that I was not alone on my similar quest.

 

 

Lind, Jane. Joyce Wieland: Artist on Fire. James Lorimer & Co. Ltd., Toronto, 2001.

How well I remember seeing a Joyce Wieland exhibition in the 1970s at the old National Gallery of Art in Ottawa. “Reason over Passion” (1968) and “O Canada” (1970) told me that fabric and craft could be viewed as art. Both Wieland’s parents died when she was very young. As a result, she used her very imaginative and creative brain to explore ways through art to find her parents and create a past that might or might not have existed but a past that could become memory. Moreover, I was inspired by her life as an artist separate from her partner, Michael Snow, a difficult achievement for a woman then and now.

 

Hollander, Anne. Seeing Through Clothes. Berkeley, University of California, 1993.

Our clothes speak their own language by announcing our sex, our culture, our social standing and our role-playing. This seminal work, and Professor Hollander’s way of looking at the world, has deeply informed my views.

 

Meyer-Thoss, Christiane, Louise Bourgeois: Designing for Free Fall. Zurich: Amman Verlag. 1992.

I feel that the child is alive in every artist. It is true that you are unable to free yourself from your past. You can only work from it and with it. At Laverne Avenue Public School in Guelph during the summer of my eighteenth year as co-head of a summer parks program we enlisted the help of the children attending to make a gigantic ant out of coat hangers and papier-mâché made with used newspapers. Our artistic effort won the Science prize at the end of the summer. Looking back, I can see that’s when my love of working with wire as material was born.