Adrienne Gale and Orson, photograph by Julie Morawski

Our Paper Dress artists live close and far, far away. This week we are featuring Adrienne Gale who hails from Hartford, CT and Anne-Maree Hunter who lives in Australia.

Adrienne is a mother and artist who lives and works in her hometown of Hartford, CT.  Her work addresses some of the struggles she encountered as a new mother. Her dress addresses the challenges of breastfeeding in public and how that relates to her own body image issues. We love this photograph taken by Julie Morawski that really explains the concept of the dress.

The construction combines basketry with a blanket stitch around pages/fabric from books on childbirth and breast feeding. Her smaller paper origami dress contains many of the same themes of revealing and concealing, a concept that can be understood by many mothers.

Our other artist of the month, Anne-Maree Hunter is a printmaker and book artist who’s motto we love:  Faciendi plures libros nullus est finis, as we were assured in Ecclesiastes 12-12, is that “Of making many books there is no end”.

Her “Slave to Fashion” origami paper dresses sold out within the first week or so of the exhibition. With these dresses as well as her larger piece, “Bunches of Flowers” she uses dress-makers patterns to stand in for the written or unwritten codes of practice or ways of behaving related to fashion.

Her commentary on foot-binding–the heart of “Bunches of Flowers”  and consumerism –the heart of “Slave to Fashion” ask the viewer to consider these forms of as confinement or restriction of freedom and a way of viewing and controlling women. We hope they and all these dresses to encourage the viewer to think about the many ways women negotiate these challenges locally and globally.