Layered, Buoyed, Tethered, Barely

Governor’s Island, Summer 2008

This installation was based around ideas of gravity and weightlessness, delicacy and heaviness, and mark-making and drawing. I made a series of cyanotypes (victorian blueprints) by contact printing baby and doll dresses—I also made dresses out of feathers, paper, eggshells, cotton, seeds, leaves, hair, twigs, etc; contacted printed them, and made a ceiling of both types of images. There was also a 6 foot tall dress hung in the room with a giant hoopskirt so that children (and adults) could go up under it and see the light passing through the layers of antique fabric. I then covered the floor with papers and pencils so people could draw, and had one area by a window where 15 plumb bobs were hung at different heights, and the ones that touched the paper drew marks as if the wind from the window was making a drawing. My intent was to make an installation that felt summery and breezy and nautical--with the theme and the colors—since it was installed on an island.

I had tried to install the cyanotypes with threads connected to them, as if they were kites, and these would have been collected together and the lines would have gone out the window. I ran into trouble keeping the prints on the ceiling, as the hot summer days kept melting the tape that was holding them to the ceiling, so in the end I couldn’t put more weight on the fronts of the prints.

I also meant for the big dress to be placed in the center of the room, pulled up by a rope. I had planned for it to be tethered to the 4 walls by laundry lines with pulleys at the walls, and something heavy dangling off the pulleys or lying on the floor—either rocks or bags of sand. I wasn’t allowed to put a hole in the ceiling to hang the dress, so this part of the idea was sadly lost.