Textile artist explores concepts of home and identity through haute couture
Nancy Price who teaches at the Alberta College of Art and Design and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax designs and crafts original haute couture garments that challenge western identity norms. The garments — dresses headdresses and arrangements on mannequin busts and shelves — are a dialogue between the individual and the outside world. “We talk about identity all the time” she says in an interview “but we are very limited in what individual freedoms we allow ourselves.”
Words are burned into or bleached out of the fabric of the dresses. They are Price’s thoughts about the content of her work doubts pertaining to loving relationships apprehension with core western beliefs and historical instances of individuals voicing themselves publicly. A hand-dyed black dress named after the former owner of Price’s home in Dover Nova Scotia Lilian addresses the legacies of individual women from the same region.
Price influenced by her surroundings rubbed angel faces skulls and pointed fingers with text such as “Absent from the Body” from long-deceased Dover women’s headstones. The images and words were rubbed on paper and then screen printed onto the fabric using chemicals to burn holes into or remove the dye from the cloth. The words demonstrate how close we were in the past to the reality of death and nostalgia and how readily we expressed our feelings in vernacular images and language.
Pinned to her Styrofoam mannequin busts Idea Head ’s #1 and #2 are garment labels bearing phrases such as “labour dress” “what Aristotle said” “mediating boundaries” and “faux.” The labels allude to materializing pinning down and hoarding ideas for later use so they are not forgotten.
On Idea Head # 2 a bird’s nest of human hair a velveteen flower and a pheasant feather look like a marvelous Victorian hat. The arrangement also conjures an image of what goes on inside the head of a woman — weaving thoughts of identity and home out of the diverse materials.
Price’s dismay at western history is fully fleshed out in a “sad dark piece” she calls When a woman smiles her dress should smile with her. It is a tribute to one of the most highly regarded couturiers Madeliene Vionnet. The French designer was famous for making garments with flowing lines that moved with the body and for conceiving of the body “in the round” measuring the sculptural idiosyncrasies of each individual. Price extends this fitting of clothing and body to include the psychology of the wearer as well. Her tribute to Vionnet laboriously re-creates an original dress which drapes from ceiling to floor as an image of the feminine living form. Photographs printed onto the fabric allude to the outer layer of social constraints — alliances war mappings of territory and camouflage which cling to but don’t belong to the person underneath.
A lighter piece called Palace of Illusions is featured in the middle of the room. An odd handmade piece of furniture that is part shelving unit and part coat rack it deals directly with the concept of architecture as clothing — layers of meaning that surround and somewhat protect the body. Objects are positioned on its shelves which reference different points of experience on a woman’s body. There are two empty teacups at breast level and a box-like drawer containing another nest of human hair at crotch level. The symmetrical pairings of almost identical (but still uniquely crafted) knick-knacks on both sides of the shelving unit symbolize the artist’s preoccupation with romance or the desire to be paired with another.
Each piece in Hopeless… Romantic is functional ready to wear but uniformity and marketable fashions are far from the heart of this work. The work functions as a self-portrait of the would-be wearer of the garments. Wouldn’t it be romantic if someone went walking down the street wearing a three-tiered cake dress with poetry burned into the fabric? Someday… somewhere….
