Femme Fabrications is made from research into the American artist Joseph Cornell’s (1903-1972) source materials held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum alongside research on Jean Wilkinson’s 1977 book Flower Fabrications.

 

A series of textile works encased in silk lined boxes trace the protagonist's step-by-step construction of a rose from organdie. The floral emblem of the white rose (dried), ‘death is preferable to a loss of innocence’, becomes an editing device, which is used to consider a number of possible recipients for the rose, such as Cornell himself. Spoken word audio recordings, which ruminate on how his sexuality pertain to the criteria of the rose are edited together with home-camcorder video footage of the house that Cornell lived in for most of his life - the house he made the entirety of his artworks within.

 

Femme Fabrications was exhibited in part at Quick Millions, 2016, London, and Yvonne Lambert Gallery, 2016, Berlin. An excerpt was performed at Moving Performances, a symposium exploring the politics and spaces of voice and unruly emotions, 2016, Faculty of Music, Oxford, and a part was published in the SELF/LOVE edition of E.R.O.S. journal, summer 2016. 

 

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