2026
Medium: Soft sculpture made from thrifted wooden vessel (uncured wild wood), metal staples, gesso, crocheted jute, crochet hook and spool in situ.
Dimensions: 17″ × 11″ x 9”
Price / Status: $1600 USD — Available for sale
Exhibition History: None
Artist Statement
This piece begins with a thrifted tourist souvenir — wild, uncured wood prematurely forced into decorative domestic form. The wood cracked along its natural grain, asserting its own nature against the shape it had been given. That crack is not damage. It is refusal. It is failure to be what is expected when that expectation goes against it’s nature.
The metal staples that close it are not repair. They are restraint. Brutal, industrial, crossing the split like sutures applied without consent — they reference the husband stitch, the medical violence routinely visited on women’s bodies by practitioners who believed those bodies existed to serve someone else’s comfort. The staples hold the crack closed the way ideology holds women in shapes they were never meant to sustain. They do not heal. They control.
Gesso whitewash covers the wood, the crack, the staples. Makes it presentable. Acceptable. Domestic. But the rust bleeds through anyway. The wounds are visible despite the makeup.
From the stapled, whitewashed body, crocheted jute rises — hours of traditional feminine handwork, patient and repetitive and unpaid, the kind of labor that holds households together and disappears without acknowledgment. The crochet pattern shifts multiple times as the extension builds. You can see where the approach changed, where the structure grew less stable, where improvisation replaced intention. This is not a failure of craft. It is an honest record of domestic labor: always adapting, never perfect, never finished.
The extension rises past the point of structural sustainability and collapses under its own weight. This is the feminine mystique made material — the promise that you can have it all, extended indefinitely upward with no support systems underneath, until everything buckles.
The crochet hook remains in the last stitch. The spool of jute sits at the base, thread still attached. The work is interrupted, not complete. It was never going to be complete.
A woman’s work is never done.