Inspiration for Paper Dresses

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act that Joe Biden introduced first in 1990 while chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and was then signed into law on September 13, 1994 by President Clinton. One of the ways of acknowledging this important anniversary in the wake of the Ray Rice awfulness is through a “book object” that I am making to exhibit at Paper Dresses. 

The “book object” is a large clamshell box that holds 40 paper origami dresses. Each dress will be stenciled with a line of text from various fact sheets about domestic violence, magazine and newspaper articles, tweets and selections from Half the Sky, an incredible book by Nicolas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. You’ll have to come to the exhibit to see it. I’ll be posting some of the dresses with their text in the next week or so as the exhibit becomes even closer.

In addition to this book object, on September 25th when the exhibit Paper Dresses opens at PRESS, the exhibit will showcase other work that uses the dress as the common form that links women around the world together.

The exhibit will feature an incredible print exchange that had women from the Berkshires, Australia, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Pennsylvania printing and folding paper into lovely little origami dresses. There will be wearable paper dresses that directly explore the idea of freedom and confinement through typography and paper, as well as two-dimensional drawings and prints related to what it means to be a woman right here right now.

Remember Women hold up half the sky, Chinese Proverb.