AND THE FATES PUT DOWN THEIR HANDS is a body of work conceived as a response to an overhanging, ambivalent relationship with male-authored constructions of femininity that pervaded my literary and cultural world as I grew up. Mostly exposed during formative years to white, male authors and a white, male interpretation of folkloric and myth traditions, as a teen I developed a peculiar brand of internalized misogyny, wanting to see myself through those strange, ghostly romantic damsels, or furious, fearsome goddesses that always seemed to be karmically tragic, damned, or demonized for their power, allure, or mere existence. This body of work is an attempt to contend with this tendency of “self-allegorization,” and to engage with the different archetypal tropes that repeat throughout many folkloric and literary traditions which describe or problematize women or those who are othered.
This body of work is staged around four key sculptures made of hand-woven glass beads: a crown, a robe, a shirt, and three pairs of gloves. Hinging on the prominent role clothing, adornment, and textiles play in the storytelling around femininity, this project takes seriously the power inscribed in making, wearing, and imagining for unpacking internalized cultural narratives. While beadwork is often reserved for embellishment or jewelry-scale work, my use of beads to make the very fabric of these pieces is an attempt to illustrate the alchemy of shifting supporting roles into the spotlight. Together, the works in this show summon stories of goddesses, witches, femme fatales, spinsters, hysterics, oracles, selkies, rusalkas, and all their many relations. As wearable, semi-functional forms, they hold places for bodies—real or imagined—but they also stand in for bodies themselves. The invitation or temptation to take them up and wear them holds inside of it the slippage between self-determination and self-allegorization.
AND THE FATES PUT DOWN THEIR HANDS was made over the course of 2020, a year when the dire need to collectively reevaluate the dominant stories that we have been taught about the world was irrevocably underlined. The image of the Fates relinquishing their hands is an image of an opportunity for a break in the assumed course of the future, a rejection of inevitability, an acknowledgement of personal responsibility, and a refusal to rely on a mythic order to be restored. It is a retiring of tired narratives and an invitation to pick up new roles, ways of being, and logics for the world. It is a hope that we might find ways to shed roles that do not serve our future and to be bold enough to take up, reinvent, try on, and reimagine new ones.
This body of work is staged around four key sculptures made of hand-woven glass beads: a crown, a robe, a shirt, and three pairs of gloves. Hinging on the prominent role clothing, adornment, and textiles play in the storytelling around femininity, this project takes seriously the power inscribed in making, wearing, and imagining for unpacking internalized cultural narratives. While beadwork is often reserved for embellishment or jewelry-scale work, my use of beads to make the very fabric of these pieces is an attempt to illustrate the alchemy of shifting supporting roles into the spotlight. Together, the works in this show summon stories of goddesses, witches, femme fatales, spinsters, hysterics, oracles, selkies, rusalkas, and all their many relations. As wearable, semi-functional forms, they hold places for bodies—real or imagined—but they also stand in for bodies themselves. The invitation or temptation to take them up and wear them holds inside of it the slippage between self-determination and self-allegorization.
AND THE FATES PUT DOWN THEIR HANDS was made over the course of 2020, a year when the dire need to collectively reevaluate the dominant stories that we have been taught about the world was irrevocably underlined. The image of the Fates relinquishing their hands is an image of an opportunity for a break in the assumed course of the future, a rejection of inevitability, an acknowledgement of personal responsibility, and a refusal to rely on a mythic order to be restored. It is a retiring of tired narratives and an invitation to pick up new roles, ways of being, and logics for the world. It is a hope that we might find ways to shed roles that do not serve our future and to be bold enough to take up, reinvent, try on, and reimagine new ones.