Dressing the Invisible

I have always been working with my hands. My mother is a painter and teacher. I grew up participating in the weekly art classes she would teach the kids in the neighborhood. Growing up I was interested in painting mostly, eventually getting into screen printing through art classes I took at University of the Arts in Philadelphia. I believe this sparked my interest in fashion early on, I liked working more with textiles than a paintbrush. I wasn’t that interested in being a fashion designer, but I wanted to learn how to sew and work with materials more technically. I ended up getting into Parsons and studying fashion design, it was my ticket into New York.

In school I learned various sewing and construction techniques, but I struggled with designing clothing. I got very frustrated my second year in school because I wasn’t able to design a fashion collection efficiently, I instead would spend the semester meticulously adding little details to a single dress. The way I worked and the demands of the fashion industry did not align, so it pushed me to think of an alternative approach. When the pandemic hit I took a year off, spending most of my time figuring out what I really wanted to make. I collaborated with my friend, another fashion student at Parsons. We both wanted to work on a project other than clothes, so we decided on making lamps. Using sewing and construction techniques we learned in school, we created a series of lamps designed using the principles of fashion. This was my first artistic effort, a duo project titled Guardian Angel School. This project was the beginning of my art practice and laid the foundation for my work going forward.

In a strange way, fashion design taught me how to be an artist. I felt that the work that I wanted to make was an inbetween of the two. I continued experimenting with dressing objects instead of the body. I spent a year wrapping teapots in leather and stitching them together, a process that felt exciting. I exhibited them in galleries downtown, I was becoming an artist with the skills of a fashion designer. I discovered other artists and designers whose work shared similar interests. I’m heavily inspired by the works of Martin Margiela, Hans Bellmer, and Heidi Bucher. Their work interests me because they ask simple questions. Margiela: What would doll clothes look like life-sized? Bellmer: How do you rearrange a doll? Bucher: How do you make a room fly? I like this approach in creating… in any medium, because they are answering a question. The questions may be simple, but the technicality of creating these works is the challenge, and to me the beauty of their work.

The question that lingered in my head throughout school- What could fashion be without the body? Which then led to: How could a dress exist on its own? My senior thesis at Parsons, I conceived of a collection of dresses that asked this question. I experimented with various materials and eventually landed on fiberglass. I figured since it’s a woven material, it could be sewn. Fiberglass is used primarily in the boating and surfboard industry, known for its strength to weight ratio when combined with resin; it was the perfect material for this project. I created a prototype in school, designed after a childrens christening gown. The dress looked like a ghost, hollow, transparent, and stood on its own without support. I revisited the project in 2024 when I was invited to do a solo show at Europa gallery in Chinatown. I made the majority of the work in Montreal, in a studio located in the garment district. I fully devoted myself to this project for 6 months, going to the studio everyday to work on them. The fiberglass itself was the most challenging material I’ve ever worked with. Constantly fraying and getting embedded in my skin, It was an exhausting process.

I titled the show Actress, after an abandoned fictional brand I thought of creating. The work in the show feels like the culmination of all the questions and ideas that were circling in my head in school.