kimberly english

over / under
MFA Solo Exhibition at UNC’s Alcott Gallery
March 2018

“Cloth is the body’s first architecture; it protects, conceals, and reveals; it carries our weight, swaddles us at birth and covers us in sleep and death… When we speak of its qualities we speak of the cloth’s hand; we know it through touch. Like skin, its membrane is responsive to contact, to the movement of air, to gravity’s pull.”
-Ann Hamilton, The Event of a Thread

over / under is an examination of labor. This exhibition features textile works that critically investigate “women’s work”. Through traditional and unfamiliar manipulations of textiles, the corporeal and the corporate are confronted in the negation of function. In this work, formal responses to the female body, mechanical labor, and the structure of fabric catalyze cloth to become ubiquitous with the body. The notion of “women’s work” is evolving with contemporaneous globalization and industrialization, and the textiles’ labels of origin act as evidence of their collision. This exhibition invites a connection between bodily and massmarket production, as these works dwell in the space somewhere between the repulsion of blood and the necessity of Target (and vice versa). Red conjures the bodily and the superficial simultaneously. In the midst of late capitalist industrialization, still the body labors. Menstruation, mopping, and mechanical reproduction straddle the chasm of human production, magnifying the female worker as the catalyst in over / under.