A Decorated Woman

A Decorated Woman builds an alphabet of women flattened by history, whether or not history noticed them. Some are barely recorded at all; others are exhaustively documented and still reduced to a single repeatable version of themselves — one story standing in for the whole person, regardless of how famous she became. There is no single model of heroism among them — fame reduces as efficiently as erasure does, and the record each woman left behind is as specific, and at times as contradictory, as the life that produced it. Each work sets a specific woman — scientist, monarch, journalist, artist, sometimes named only by the title standing in for her — against a body assembled entirely from collage: jewelry, textile, and ornament functioning as archive rather than adornment, the material fragments of a life reassembled into a single figure.
Beneath every portrait is the same mannequin, fixed across the series, standing in for the female body as history has actually used it: displayed, dressed, decided about, rarely consulted.