forgotten women - abby normal

Crocheted doilies, hand embroidery, acrylic paint, fire. 6”x6”, 2023. Sold Individually.

This series was inspired by the crocheted doilies left behind as the primary physical legacy of generations of (mostly) women, as the means by which their descendants remember them, or don’t. I made each doily for this project and then burned them to reveal an embroidered PET scan of a brain, indicating diagnosable mental illnesses (according to the infallible medical research repository of Google Images). As I made them, I imagined each person’s rich interior life, as it may have been unknown by the families who touched their creations, who boxed them up after the funerals, who set their coffee mugs on the thousands of tiny knots brought to life by bones and sinew and pain and laughter.

“Abby Normal” (mostly green brain)

Abby’s brain is “normal,” whatever that means. Abby’s never felt normal in her life, not for one fleeting moment, no matter how much she tries to file down her edges and hew herself into the shape of normal. Abby writes bad poems about her garden and loves to ride on public transit, where she can let her mind unwrinkle and forget not to think about her best friend from junior high school, whose hair was like the afternoon light catching on wheat and whose hands were the softest things she’d ever touch.