“The Dyeing Dress”
“The Dyeing Dress”
Art Monthly Australia
December 2011-February 2012
In a small white room, a woman stands on a small, birch plywood platform, under a small, suspended white box, in a big black dress. A fiddler begins to play an old-time American folk tune. Poised with her hands softly clasped at her waist, the woman begins to sing a lament to her dead children. With a distant gaze, she begins to sway, slowly and rhythmically; hypnotically. With this restrained, contained, keening gesture, she is just holding it in, just keeping herself together. Water begins to fall like gentle rain, from the white box above her head, onto her neatly arranged strawberry ringlets and dramatic, floor-length crinoline dress. Drop by drop at first, and then gradually more heavily, it causes her dress to begin to weep. Dye bleeds into the platform below, as the dress eventually threatens to disintegrate, to fall apart, but it does not; she does not. As the black discharge spreads, a dark cloud forms beneath her feet, like the clouds in her song; the clouds on which her dead children walk.
Queen Victoria was in mourning for more than half of her sixty-four-year reign. Her subjects followed suit, or rather, dress. In an age of high infant mortality, people lived with death. Strict and elaborate mourning customs and costumes may have provided a way of coping, but they also took their toll on those left behind. It was women whose lives were often most deeply scarred by death; even their bodies were indelibly marked by mourning. Marked out in society, Victorian women in mourning were also marked in more intimate ways, for their mourning ‘weeds’ were dyed with unstable plant dyes, liable to seep into their skin when released by rain or sweat.
Since uprooting from her Philadelphia home a few years ago and moving to Melbourne, where the legacy of the Victorian era dominates the cityscape, interdisciplinary artist Martha McDonald has immersed herself in Victorian mourning culture, in search of a performative language to express her sense of loss and longing for home, and the impermanence of things.
In late 2009, McDonald created and performed The Further the Distance, the Tighter the Knot, in St Kilda’s Linden Gallery, formerly a grand Victorian mansion. Dressed in a fantastical Edwardian- inspired, black, hand-knitted dress, McDonald obsessively knitted and unraveled trails of black wool, as she lead audiences on an intimate tour of the house, which she had decorated with memento- mori, such as hand-woven jewellery referencing the elaborate and fastidious art of hair jewellery, once a common way of memorialising a loved one.
McDonald’s next investigation into the resonances between Victorian mourning culture and her own story began with a journey into the dark side of gardens. A passionate gardener fascinated by extinct plants, she crafted a macabre black bloom, its life extinguished, but not yet dead; an evocative mourning weed in the form of a crepe paper dress, which would fade, wilt and crumple like a delicate flower. The gardens project that inspired the dress failed to flower, but the dress refused to die.
New to McDonald, crepe paper proved a surprisingly apt material for her mourning dress, out of the garden as well, uncannily imitating its namesake fabric, ‘crepe’, from which mourning dresses were often traditionally made. Backed with stiffening calico, the dress’s 140cm-diameter skirt formed a perfect bell shape over its crinoline scaffolding, made from hoops of garden hose, recalling its creative origins, and hinting at the traumatic baptism awaiting it.
McDonald’s crepe paper dress made its debut last year, as part of the Death Be Kind project. Above a Brunswick bar, in a small room in a former Victorian terrace house, wearing her volatile dress, McDonald cried. Her tears slowly leached the dress from black to blue, expressing its dark blood and visibly staining the pale skin around her neck.
In a departure from her previous two mourning dress pieces, McDonald’s latest work took the dress out of the house, the setting in which the bereaved Victorian woman often spent years, trapped and driven to distraction with grief and boredom; driven to the obsessive handcrafts that typically filled her days. In The Weeping Dress, a performance and installation which took place in March-April 2011, in conjunction with the Melbourne Fashion Festival, McDonald cut the dress out of its historic and domestic comfort zone, and placed it in the relatively stark, almost ‘white cube’ space of Craft Victoria. By removing all extraneous elements, McDonald sought to concentrate the dress; to distill its essence.
Whereas the earlier pieces responded to the resonances of their respective sites – ‘activating’ them, in McDonald’s words – in The Weeping Dress, the dress became the site; an emotional crucible, ‘activated’ and ultimately transformed not by fire but instead by water. The platform on which she stood was also
transformed by the water, as it activated the dress: the wet dye acted like a glossy varnish, turning the matte wooden surface into a reflective pool, like the mirrors that Victorian mourners had to keep covered.
McDonald’s magnificent dresses take many months to make and are destroyed in just a few moments, in front of her audience’s eyes; unraveled or bedraggled. The Weeping Dress was shaped by a process of building up and stripping down, in other ways too; well before it met its lyrical demise on stage, McDonald had reduced the dress – its performance – to the bare essentials. It was a ‘seams-out’ approach, the artist explained: the rainmaker and platform were undisguised and unadorned, their make-up exposed. This rawness at first created a jolting counterpoint to the impeccable finish of the dress, which initially gave the convincing illusion of fabric. But when the illusion began to melt away and the true nature of the dress, as it underwent its profound transformation, was revealed; the materiality of the rainmaker and platform came to underscore the artifice of the dress.
However, McDonald stopped short of undressing in front of her audience to show her stained skin and reveal the dress’s unorthodox construction, necessitated by its fragile fabrication. She did not want to disturb the mood, the emotional charge built up over the twenty-minute performance. She also wanted to leave the audience with the image of the dress: washed-out, worn-out; distressed and depleted; sodden and sad; bled and blue; pallid and lifeless, but importantly, intact; retaining its integrity, its dignity. The blue-black bruises left on McDonald’s skin by the fugitive dye, as it bled out of the dress, remained almost unknown to the viewer in this performance; the private stains of grief and suffering, behind the public face of the dress.
Indeed, inside her thin paper shell, McDonald was hiding the strain along with the stain; she confessed to finding the experience especially confronting. For the first time in her performing life, in The Weeping Dress, McDonald resisted the temptation to talk. Although in previous performances, she has sought to connect with her audience and help them to connect with themselves, by verbally making herself vulnerable, this time, McDonald says, it was different: she felt more vulnerable and powerless than ever. She felt naked, as the water and the stares of her audience penetrated her flimsy shroud, soaking, searing her skin. Victorian mourning weeds, made from dense, heavy and opaque fabrics such as wool bombazine, if not crepe, were intended to shield the wearer, to absorb light; to make her effectively invisible. But they were neither impervious to the elements, nor the stares of passers-by.
This was also the first time McDonald had created an exhibition in conjunction with a performance, or rather, deposited in its wake. The installation that followed the performance featured the pale, dried, ghostly dress, hovering above the stained platform; empty, bloodless, a beautiful, fragile husk; a shed skin; a dried flower; a faded butterfly. Around the walls, photos and a film documented the performance and highlighted the expressivity of the dress and its wearer: the streaked bodice and McDonald’s slightly blue-ing hands, tending black under the nails, tidily clasped, corpse-like.
The platform bore an impression of the dress, painted by the once-crisp ruffles around the hem of its wide hoop skirt – made soggy with water, forming soft, inky bristles – as they brushed the smooth wood in calm, meditative gestures reminiscent of Japanese calligraphy. As the dye was sucked into the platform, it had feathered out like ink on blotting paper, drying to reveal the grain of the wood, echoing the wrinkles in the crepe paper, and evoking fragile, paper-like skin; a strangely human imprint.
The platform, moreover, manifested the memory of what had taken place; a shadow, a trace left by a transient existence, but also a release. Whereas in The Further the Distance, the Tighter the Knot, McDonald literally worked and un-worked the pain of dislocation, The Weeping Dress represented an acceptance of not knowing when she might go home; a letting go; a dramatic catharsis.
The Weeping Dress performance, by Martha McDonald, took place at Craft Victoria, Melbourne, 7 March 2011. The fiddle player was Craig Woodward, the platform and rainmaker were crafted by Erik North, the photos were taken by Christian Capurro, and the video was filmed by Andrew Liversidge. The installation was exhibited 10 March to 21 April 2011.
This article was judged runner-up in Art Monthly Australia’s 2011 Emerging Arts Writers’ Award, on the theme of ‘Art Meets Fashion’. Entries for the 2012 Emerging Arts Writers’ Award, on the theme of ‘The Art of Art Criticism’ (coinciding with AMA’s commemorative 250th issue, ‘Critical lining’) close 29 February 2012.