Alphabet, Language
A Decorated Woman and Love Notes work as a single system. A Decorated Woman builds an alphabet from women history has recorded unevenly, or not at all — each work reconstructing one woman, decoration functioning as archive rather than adornment. Love Notes is the language that alphabet generates: a growing vocabulary of single words and short phrases, drawn from the emotional, political, and spiritual material carried by the women in A Decorated Woman. One series produces the units; the other assembles them into something that can be spoken.
A Decorated Woman — Country Love
Love Notes — HOPE
Process & Material
The dress form is not a display device. It stands in as an archive of the female body — a structure onto which memory is layered, not displayed. Onto it, hundreds of digital layers accumulate: pearls, brooches, and metal fragments drawn from Fiori's own jewelry collection, built piece by piece over years, each object carrying a history before it enters the work. The jewelry is not ornament. It is relic — memory made material, folded into someone else's story until the two become inseparable.
The digital execution is produced in close collaboration with a small technical team, working under Myra’s direction.
Portrait of Myra Fiori by Tina Varner, of the studio's technical team, made with the A Decorated Woman process. Outside the series.