Project Statement: Eidolon

Eidolon is an installation taking the form of an anthology or a florilegium in that it is a collection of botanical imagery.

The primary sources for this work are linens and herbarium specimens.

Both herbaria and linens are archives of time and place, fraught chronicles of relationships that produce silences and reinforce oppressive  social systems dependent upon exclusionary practices and racist violence. 

Historically, needle-work and the making of personal herbaria were considered appropriate activities for women, particularly of a certain class, as they were considered to be benign, and beautifying. Such occupations gave women the implicit task of performing and reinforcing the cultural imperative that a woman enact and embody virtue and innocence. The feminine as consigned to the cultural reproduction of empire including veiling and whitewashing injustice. At the same time, stitching and mending to hold things together.

The work endeavors to undo the cultural constructs sewn and pressed into the original objects, offering radical repair through unraveling and mending and remaking.