Sleepless night
Beeswax, antique silk dress, silk child’s dress, old bedsheets,
fairy lights, aluminium wire, 2017
Inanimate objects can be imbued with our life histories. A treasured silk dress and a second hand frock and bed sheets are preserved in 2kg of beeswax to represent 2 months of work by 10,000 female worker bees. Beeswax memorialises the dresses as symbols of feminism and female work. Someone inhabited the dresses and slept in the sheets and gave them breath. Who was it? The dresses hang ghostlike above the shapes of bodies. They fall down to become shrouds. The sheets form body casts preserved in wax. Underlighting hints at cavities now devoid of bodies. This piece references the works of Eva Hesse and Anselm Kiefer.
The idea of love
broken like yesterday’s wishbone.
She is leaving today,
her arms, my shelter.
Her wings were immense
teardrops, gone forever.
Never will she suffer
never will she return –
all I have are lost memories,
tracing what is left.
– Anon
