jodi's mfa thesis

The Wardrobe Project: MFA Report

For those who are interested, and as requested an obscene amount of time ago, I have uploaded a .pdf file of my thesis report: get it here. Please feel free to download a copy, read it, send me comments, point out typos (I hope I found them all!), print it out and make beautiful drawings all over it and then send me a page in the mail; you name it. Just please don't post it or any part of it on the web or anywhere else without my permission. Not that any of my lovely thesis blog followers would do such a thing.

Enjoy!

some better images from the georgia museum

i forgot to post this

An article about my thesis project in the March/April issue of Belle Armoire magazine.

graduation dress

first, the wrap:

Woodblock-printed kozo paper (Tokuatsu), cut into strips, spun on a wheel and knit on 6.5mm needles (6 rows garter, 1 drop stitch row with a triple wrap).

dress front:

back:

april 4, 2008

I look tired: it was near the end of a long night, after waiting a long time for people to clear out of the gallery a little so I could take this photo. The opening was packed. If I wasn't so familiar with all of the work in the show it would have been frustrating trying to engage with any of it in such a crazy big crowd, but I think a lot of people are there for the schmoozing anyway, and many told me they had already been in earlier in the week to view the work.

Below are some images of people interacting with my piece; I swear it wasn't only women interested in my work, it just happened that I only managed to photograph women. It was difficult to get any decent pictures at all, there were so many people.

getting ready

This week I've been working on my outfit for tonight's opening: a new dress, sort of the evening gown version at the end of the runway show, and a wrap knitted from spun prints. All week I've been cutting, spinning, knitting, and now the wrap is blocking on the carpet.

Photos of the finished dress and wrap later. For those within driving distance of Athens GA, the opening reception is tonight at seven p.m. at the Georgia Museum of Art. And check out my graduating class: ugamfa.com.

installing

I went to the Museum and installed my work this afternoon after a hellish few days of toil and setbacks. I had problems with the images for my books and so wound up spending countless hours Sunday and Monday printing them a different way, and stabbing and sewing spines late into the night. But the installation at least went smoothly: I had lots of help, nothing got broken and I only found one extra page that had somehow snuck into one of the books by mistake (I sheepishly glanced around to make sure the museum security staff weren't looking before slowly, carefully tearing out the page, as if the works presence in the Museum should prevent me from altering it anymore. I couldn't very well leave it in, it was right at the front).

Some photos from the installation in progress (keep in mind it's not yet properly lit):

You can see that the original plan for hanging the prints was completely scrapped. I like this much better now that it's hung; it's simple and elegant and I think they look pretty damned good. Obviously the bits of paper won't stay, they're only there because the ends of the wood pieces were painted after the prints were already nailed in.

Each dress has a tag containing the dates worn and reason for withdrawal, and a book containing images of each state of the dress (each image again stamped with its corresponding date). The books are a simple stab binding with thin, flexible covers; after changing my mind a couple of times about the binding, I decided that the Chinese account-book structure would best reflect these acts of collecting, arranging, cataloguing, and list-making that have been present throughout the project. The tags were initially going to be attached to the dresses, but ended up attached to the drawers instead because each dress is folded differently inside the drawer. I like the look of the tag and book side-by-each much better than my original plan of the book sitting alone in that large space. Everything in its place but also every space filled.

There was lots of talk about whether or not it's okay for visitors to touch the dresses, as there will be a wall text inviting them to explore the drawers and look at the books but to please not remove the dresses. I don't really mind people touching them, because clothing is meant to be touched, but I don't want them messed up and placed back imperfectly folded. I guess we'll have to wait and see, and if necessary I'll walk over there every few days and check on the piece, making sure the books and dresses are all in their proper places.

Stacie asked in the comments yesterday if I'm sad. I am, a little, but not because this project is ending. I think I'm definitely ready to move on to a new body of work, although there will certainly be resonances of this project in my work for a while. I was digging through my print drawers this afternoon looking for things to show at the open portfolio session of the Southern Graphics Council conference this week, and all of the many, many prints I had to choose from contain the residue of these dresses. I wish I still had some dresses to print from, and I'm glad I'll at least have the one more dress to make (the one for opening night) so that I can catch a few more of those fleeting dress impressions.

I do feel at a loss for what to wear. Today I wore one of the skirts from way back when the project began, with a t-shirt, and it felt really strange to be wearing a t-shirt with nothing over top of it. I sort of felt like my belly was too visible.

I'm still working on a big pile of prints that are all tied up in the Wardrobe Project, and am going allow myself some time just to work through finishing up some of that, taking as much time as I need to work this project out of my system while I think about what I might like to do next. I do think that my next big project will be less about clothes and more about the categorizing and listing side, the establishment of rules and routines. But, who knows. Some days I think that I'd be perfectly happy just making and selling clothes for a while and not worrying about embarking on any more big research-based projects for a while. In the meantime, though, does anyone know where I could get one of those old factory time-punch-card machines?

preparations, march 24 08

All day long I kept sliding things down my thigh: my cellphone, my keys, a pencil, a safety pin, my hands. Feeling for my dress pockets, trying to drop things into them. I might have to sew pockets on everything I own.

march 23, 08: last dress day

dress #3, state 23 (printed march 21, 08)

The last dress.

front:

back:

in the pocket:

a detail:

a long day

Today I woke up from a night of feverish, worried dreams to find that I'd somehow sweated out all that worry in the night, and got out of bed in that state of calm that so often happens when a deadline is so inevitable and so close that you no longer have the time to procrastinate, to make food or have conversations or do anything but work, work, work right up to that deadline. It's a strangely quiet out-of-body feeling, like when your ears pop and all sounds come to you as if through water. I worked, steadily, filling in the dress tags with the typewriter, folding and collating pages for the books, arranging all of the book images (yes, that's right, I still have to pretty much make those books tomorrow, all twenty of them). I helped Jessica to frame her large prints, and we felt so confident that we even made wheat starch paste for her hinges from scratch (from flour!) and ate lunch away from the studio. I carefully measured and cut my book cloth pieces for hanging the maps, cut wood, drilled holes in dowels and put little pieces of waxed linen cord through them. And then I started gluing the whole thing together, and disaster struck. Well, near disaster. The hanging system I had envisioned for the prints is not going to work. Or rather, it would have worked but it would have taken me all night and cost me my sanity and more importantly would have looked like utter crap, unprofessional and half-assed and lumpy. So I made a snap decision (with Jessica's counseling) and made some changes. The installation method that references maps has had to be scrapped, and so I now don't have to make that map legend (that's right, I hadn't done that yet either) because it no longer makes sense for it to be that literal. The dress tags won't make sense on the maps either and so will now be on the dresses, which I think will actually be much better and will better help viewers understand what they're looking at when they flip through the books (which are images presented with only stamped dates, no text). I feel good about this.

Tomorrow, then, I will get up in the morning and put on a project dress for the last time. I will make the books. Prepare the dresses. Finish stamping dates on the dress tags and attach them to the dresses. Reassemble the drawers. Then Monday morning, a few brief errands downtown, box up the books and dresses, wrap the cabinets in bubble wrap. And take it all to the Museum and forget all about it until I go in and install it on Tuesday. What am I going to be doing on my blissful Monday night of freedom? Spinning up one of the leftover big prints on kozo with a borrowed spinning wheel, in time to bring it along to this week's conference as my knitting project for the van ride: a lace wrap that I will wear to the exhibition opening.

march 22, 08

dress #7, state 23 (printed march 15, 08)

front:

back:

a detail:

march 21, 08

Printing the final dress.