30dresses.com

The work is part performance art, part textile culture, part feminist statement, part installation art, and part photography. These images are haunting because of the presence reinforced by the absence of the wearers of these dresses. This other worldly feeling becomes stranger and more keenly understood as the locations and displays change. There... is the strength of a sisterhood of the group brought together. The gentleness and grace of the female spirit inhabits the spaces where these dresses slowly dance as memories of past gatherings, and feminine rituals. They are soft, flowing, and vulnerable as black orchids, and of course, as silent as the grave. The silence in these pictures is deafening, while everything in them and around them seems to be holding its breath. These photographs are suggestive and poignant, leaving one with the feeling that, as viewers, you are walking among victims and goddesses, all at the same time. I have constructed more than 100 dresses in the last fifteen years to photograph in the landscape. The 30 Black dresses are the most recent. I cut, sewed, and ironed each one. They are reminiscent of late 19th century womens attire, but their blackness somehow neutralizes them, or even transforms them into negative space. I place the empty dresses in a variety of natural settings including the Midwest, Texas and New Mexico. A beautiful spring in Lubbock, TX. This photograph was taken in Galveston, TX. Taken at the Prairie Chicken Refuge near Houston, TX. Taken at Brazos Bend State Park south of Houston, TX. Taken on a ranch near Lubbock, TX on a convenient irrigation boom. In Lubbock, TX every time it rained a nearby park flooded. The water was gone 3 hours later. I love Spanish moss growing in trees in southern Texas. Taken near Johnson City, VT while attending a residency at Vermont Studio Center. This pine wood reminded me of Anselm Kiefer's early work. Taken near Johnson City, VT while attending a residency at Vermont Studio Center. I love exhibited in juxtaposition to After Kiefer. ...Read More