Echoing the Binding Experience of Women for Centuries
Not your typical book. Then again, its not your typical lingerie either.
Artist Tamar Stone, inspired by her own experiences, has chosen book weaving as the medium to capturing “the moments in women’s lives when issues of appearance, self esteem and assimilation become paramount due to physical restrictions placed on the body…”
With such a powerful inspiration its no surprise that the bindings beared by women’s corsetry would find its way into her work. But even it could have expected to become the book itself. Her interest in body image — and through that corsets — came from a lifetime of forced binding as scoliosis forced her in her teens to wear a brace 23 hours out of the day. Again in her adult life she found herself once more corseted as a herniated disk forced back into constraints. It is throughout these years that she developed a sensitivity to “correction” and the need to fit in.
Wanting to tell the stories she was telling but needing them to become more 3-dimensional, not just text on paper but stories that were a part of the textile, Stone began embroidering the text into the fabric forcing the reader to interact intimately with the book and the stories being told within.
Having to take time to unlace the ties, undo the buckles, all in order to read the text, is a part of the contemplation and therapy of the process; echoing the binding experience women for a century of dressing and undressing have been experiencing.
As for the texts themselves, they come from a variety of sources from behavioral manuals of the 19th and 20th century, which describe prescriptions of public and private conduct, as well as personal narratives of women who have lived with these physical constraints.
“To Make Her Look Her Best Vol. 1“
“Society’s Corset: Hints to a Fashionable Lady“
“Health, Strength, Grace and Symmetry, Vol 2: Develop to the Highest Degree of Attainable Perfection“
Bob Eckstein said,
August 20, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Amazing work.