Her Story - The Exhibition

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This part of the project is an exhibition consisting of sculptured dresses made with the inspiration from four of the artst’s foremothers, photography, video and paintings.

 

The exhibition had its premiere October 16, 2021 in:

Linneanum, Botanical Gardens, Uppsala, Sweden.
Following viewings:
Gasklockan, Gävle, Sweden June 16-30 2022
Enköpings konsthall, Sweden January 21-February 12
Enköpings konsthall
The exhibition is an attempt at celebrating the lives of women who lived before us, who spent their lives cleaning and serving without having the possibility to change their lot in life.

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The sculptured dresses are made with materials based on and inspired from each woman’s life, i.e. letters of recommendations from working as a maid in New York 1906-1909. Dishrags and beans from surviving as a single mother of five and a cleaner early 1900’s. Crocheted doilies and ”cigarette” paper for the unstable woman who smoked and crocheted through her life. Canvas, acrylic paint and lead for the woman who had years of radiation therapy but who came in too late for throat cancer and could not be treated and died at the age of 31.

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The artist has attempted to beautify these women’s hardship and the dresses are therefore made to look beautiful and fairylike at first sight, before one is being aquatinted with the woman as a person and with what type of life she lived.

 

The sculptured dresses were constructed so that the artist was able to wear them and let herself be photographed and filmed at a place where the women had lived and worked, thus carrying her own history.

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As exhibited pieces the dresses have an abundance of red origami paper birds dwelling inside the dresses and escaping upwards. A sense of life, of movement and a presence from insides their sculptures dresses.

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