Nail Dress
By Rachel Bonham Carter
Clothes are made to be inhabited by a living, breathing body, but a garment designed to be left vacant or empty takes on a powerful life of its own.
Admittedly, this was not a thought that troubled me before I wandered around the AAF Contemporary Art Fair in New York this summer. At eight months pregnant, my most pressing sartorial concern was: Does it stretch far enough?’ As I loomed large around the exhibits, keenly aware of the imminent danger I posed to many of the pedestal-perched sculptures, one piece yanked me from my daydreams well before I could do it any damage: a diaphanous white dress speckled with rust-colored flecks, hanging from a barely visible line. It appeared caught in a moment of frozen theatricality like clothing hung out to dry on a windless day.
British sculptor Moira Chester is frequently asked whether she works in theater, and although she doesn’t – other than occasionally reclaiming material from costume-makers’ off-cuts -- her exhibits have an air of performance about them. Her sculpted and collaged clothes are often suspended from the rafters, forcing the visitor to look upward at a somewhat spectral dance -- empty outfits that inevitably inspire their audience to imagine the bodies and souls which might fill them, and the stories they might live through.
What at first glance had looked to me like an innocent shift dress from the 1920s quickly fell into a darker focus as I moved closer. Not the ethereal muslin I’d assumed, but ripped shreds of plasterers’ scrim held in place with iron nails and glue. Ms. Chester began tearing the material for what would become this dress in 2003 on the day that Baghdad felt that first wave of Shock and Awe. On the phone from her studio in Southwest London she recalls the sense of impotence and frustration that she and her friends felt at the time. She remembers a photograph from a newspaper showing the aftermath of a cluster bomb, and her subsequent sadness that so many innocent women and children would suffer.
The scrim and nails were first hung as curtains but sculptress Chester, responding without realizing it to the vulnerability of women during war, refashioned the piece into a dress. It was when she added plaster to stiffen and strengthen the materials that the work took on a life of its own and the artist stepped back as director and watched as the materials took over. The nails began to rust, leaching iron oxide in to the strips of torn fabric, creating an overall effect of bloodied, ripped, nail-studded bandages. The rusty destruction is gradual. Just as the situation in Iraq appears to spiral ever downward, so nature pulls this dress a little closer toward its own inevitable disintegration.
Robert Devic, director of the London gallery GV Art, which was showing “Nail Dress” in New York at the Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th Street this past June, says it was very well received. “A few people thought it humorous,” he told me, “until I asked if they thought war was funny and explained the purpose of the piece.” It’s reassuring to hear that this viewer is not alone in having been duped by the apparently soft lines of the dress from afar.
Moira Chester, born in 1949, grew up in the Surrey countryside outside London. Remembering woodland walks from her childhood, she loves watching nature interact with her work, particularly the simple beauty of light filtering through man-made fabrics. As with the plasterers’ scrim and costume off-cuts, much of the material she uses -- including plastics, glass, and metal -- is recycled or even reclaimed from the dumpster.
She admits to feeling nostalgic for the natural fibers used in the clothes of her grandparents’ era, when things were made to last and be handed down through the generations. “My work shows a kind of sadness that nature is disappearing,” says Moira. “And in a way, it is a comment on the wastefulness of the fashion industry, filled as it is with so many cheap and mass-produced, throwaway items.”
Not only a comment on the fashion industry but also a direct response to events around her. “Nail Dress” is not the first time war has moved her to creation. Toward the end of 2001. when war raged and winter descended on Afghanistan, she plastered and stitched together pieces of scrim with gold wire and red and black thread. With those materials as her starting point, she let the work take its own shape, and soon realized her intuitive response to world events had grown to resemble worn-out animal pelts or skeletons. The fabric grew in to a piece she named “Winter Coat.”
Her garments are never designed to be worn, and although she tells me of the powerful “shaman-like” image of a friend trying on “Winter Coat,” she feels that a greater power lies in the possibility and suggestion of empty clothing.
In contrast to her war-inspired pieces, Chester’s more recent work reflects a desire for lightness. Current projects in the London studios she shares with more than one hundred other artists, are much more celebratory. She describes colorful and playful fairy-tale inspired sculptures intended to uplift an audience rather than plunge it into despair about the state of world.
She delights in the fact that her work does make people stop, think, and talk. She is often struck, she says, by the number of visitors to her shows who say that her art makes them want to create and make with their own hands. It is great validation of the power of her own work -- an artist who only took to that métier after decades of working on the other side of the fence as a teacher of art history and as publications and exhibitions coordinator at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.
The decision to switch came during a six-month tour of India in 1989. Inspired by the raw contrasts of life, color, and light that she experienced, and awestruck by the sheer majesty and mystique of the Himalayas, Moira felt spurred to follow her own passion to create
I love the fact that nature resonates so clearly throughout her work, but her “Nail Dress” is the only piece I have seen in the flesh, and it both delights and saddens me that nature will reclaim it. Maybe I’m picking up on the artist’s own nostalgia, or maybe it’s the sensitivity of a heavily pregnant first-time mother-to-be, but the combination of fragility and emptiness is incredibly moving and thought-provoking, given the parallels with Iraq.
That her work is so perishable also leaves Ms. Chester at odds with her own feelings. One of her favorite works, “Ice Dress,” is a long, white, ethereal creation of tissue paper and plastic which has almost reached the end of its lifespan. “What I would really love to do,” its maker says, “is fly it off the top of a hill.” What a glorious image! The nostalgic artist flinging her creation on to the winds and breezes to let nature take it where it will. “But in reality,” she says, “I will recycle it as the starting point of a new piece.” And so the costume lives on, to begin a new dialogue with new materials and a new storyline. In this way, Moira Chester is tapping into something fundamental to nature and our very existence: the great cycle of renewal and life. Surely that’s why I am so moved by her work at this point in my own journey.
The gallerey's website is http://www.gvart.co.uk
