some women

My latest series, Some Women, expands my sculptural practice into an unconventional photographic space. Over the past twelve years, I’ve worked extensively with images of iconic cultural and political figures appropriated from mass-market history books, printing these images onto textiles and sewing them into soft, allegorical sculptures. These slumping, deflated constructions—slipcovers of first ladies and busts of celebrities and former presidents—embody the worn-out myths that America uses to prop up its narratives of exceptionalism. 

Likewise, in Some Women, I relied on historical images of women as my source material. With this series, though, I took the process of transmutation one step further. I used images of women convicted of murder to construct a suite of sewn sculptures, then arranged the figures and photographed them as portraits. Each figure is an amalgamation of several women, so they defy recognition, and the conversion of materials from source image to sculpture to photograph produces an ambiguous space that complicates the relationship between object and image. This approach mimics the process by which history creates archetypes from individuals, flattening them into mere representations that nevertheless have a powerful influence on the collective imagination. Dramatically lit and arranged into conspicuously strange poses, these figures function as avatars of society’s fascinated repulsion for women who have violated cultural norms and betrayed the “nature” of their gender.

Bean Gilsdorf is a fourth-generation seamstress who currently works at the intersection of sculptural textiles and photography. Her projects have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and the American Textile History Museum, as well as exhibition spaces in England, Italy, China, Poland, and South Africa. Gilsdorf's work is included in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, Kala Art Institute, and the International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.