forgotten women - darla

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.

“Darla” (Bipolar - light blue)

Darla explodes into the lives of the people who are lucky enough to meet her like hard artillery and leaves behind a bombed-out shell of a building when she inevitably vanishes again. She’s impossibly vibrant, so bright that it almost hurts to look at her tossing her head back with dangerous, wild mirth. And then when she’s gone, it’s a bright spot on the back of your eyelids, swimming hazily in memory. She leaves behind piles of things half-made, unfinished, works in progress, and no one will ever be able to complete them.