On view as part of the Resist! concert season at Tonhain, and accompanying the theme of our collaborative concert "Spectacle" on May 15, 2026, I created an original art installation to be displayed in the front window.
This art piece is inspired by archival photos from my research that showed all the ways that women marketed their cause with their bodies: waving banners, draping sashes, strapping on posters that covered their entire torsos, and even literally wearing lettered posters as makeshift garments. I was struck by how bold, clear, and united their presentation was as well as how powerful it was to embody the message.
In my research at NYPL’s Picture Collection, one photo kept calling my attention: a black and white clipping of a suffragette being forcibly removed by two men at Enfield in 1914 - the impeccable elegance of all three in their summer hats, the hauntingly resistant look on her face. In my sculpture, I wanted to communicate the powerful conviction in this image as well as the solidarity that permitted such a movement to take place. Here are a few behind-the-scenes photos and thoughts during the development of this work.
Exploring in miniature how a base of flat garments could be viewed as a sculpture, as well as serving as a canvas for an image when layered together.
The actual garment types chosen for the sculpture - an apron, a shirtwaist, and a long skirt - were inspired by clothing with historical significance, but redesigned in a minimal, modern way. [Photo credit: Museum of London/Heritage Images/Getty Image, 1909]
The question of how best to translate the historical photo across a larger scale, on fabric, and across multiple layers of thicknesses, led to many experiments: gel transfers, painting, as well as different digital image translations. The final decision to translate the image through a dot technique came from its connection to newspaper printing (an important mode of communication for the Suffragettes), the playful dynamic between legibility and scale, and the feasibility of printing by hand.
Before (above) and after (below). To prepare the image for digital manipulation, the cropped archival photo had to be completed by hand, which I painted in Procreate. Burgess Voshell, who collaborated with me, wrote a custom script to translate the image into varying sizes of dots.
The block printing tools were made by shaving down wooden dowels to specific diameters.
All of the pleats and layers of the final garment-sculpture were hand-stitched down to create a surface area that was as flat as possible.
Meticulously prepared files for each layer of dots was prepared by Burgess, and step by step, over 8,000 dots were stamped by hand.
The final art installation will be on view from January - June 2026 at Tonhain, Thorwaldsenstr. 26, Berlin Germany.