Iris of Edyn aka Pearl

$15,000.00

2019

79 x 89 inches

Fabric and molding paste

The women who wore these dresses before me were people I did not know. Some of them were found one morning on Marylebone High Street in a church donation shop in London. A young woman had just dropped off her deceased mothers’ dresses; I walked in an hour later and bought them all. I tried them on playing dress up and dancing around my home with absolutely nowhere to go. I took these dresses across the Atlantic to my childhood home along the Pacific.

Some of the other dresses I bought in a vintage shop in Sebastopol, California called Aubergine. In my 30s, I had them altered to fit me for parties. The dress of one tag says, ‘Made Exclusively for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.’ In all of them I possessed — or became possessed with — another’s energy. In all of them I took photos. When it was time, I cut them into swatches to make a quilt and its shape I molded from the contours of my body.

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