09 Dressed for the Occasion

Dressed for the Occasion 2005
Bronze h45 x w50 x d29 cm

I keep reminding myself that being a woman today is a lot better than it used to be.  I am fortunate to have been born into a time, and a society, that allows women to have a voice and live a life of independence.  Over the years, I’ve witnessed a lot of positive change, but also railed at the patriarchal, societal pressures that continue to keep women tied to ‘their place’ – whether that’s as a sex object or in the kitchen.

There’s also that continuous nagging pressure for a woman to always look her best … for whom?  I can still recall my mother’s advice to me when I got married: “Remember to look your best when he comes home after a hard day’s work, put your lipstick on and have a nice glass of wine ready waiting for him while you cook the supper.”

Head: Dressed for the occasion attempts to capture all of this unfairness, the duality of modern womanhood, the demands, the frustrations.  I went hunting again, this time for a beautiful dress with buttons all the way down the front.  Once again, I found success in the local charity shop.  I felt the perfect foil for my sculpture was the Little Black Dress launched into fame by Coco Chanel in the 1920s and which subsequently became The dress to have.  It is also, typically, a very sexy dress.  I wanted to find an item of clothing that would encapsulate all of these things.

Brancusi’s sculpture Princess X (1916, bronze) was also a big influence here.  Its minimalist representation of a woman’s head on a long sinuous neck ending in full rounded breasts caused uproar in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1920.  The furore forced Brancusi to withdraw his piece from the exhibition due to its phallic form, something he strongly denied was intended.

I kept the central core for my sculpture very simple, to mirror this phallic form, and dressed it with my buttoned-up dress.  As we all know, people change the way they behave depending on who they are with and which situation they find themselves in.  In this way, they are ‘dressing for an occasion’.  The sculpture needed the buttons to visualise this idea of unbuttoning the face, which again, hints at changing personalities/dresses, as well as being a continuation of the sexual element.

The fabric burnt out beautifully, with the bronze picking up all the detail from the dress: the fine cotton texture of the fabric, the lines of stitching holding the dress together, the buttons and all the beautiful folds that swirled round to form the shoulders.  So much magic from the medium, such sensitive details captured.  Naturally, I finished her off with a black patina.  A sculpture that was both head and dress, woman and sex object.