After the Sunday runway show in January, Dr. V and her daughter came up to talk to me and look at my dress. At one point she said to her daughter, “Look, it’s like a storybook,” and explained the progression of the silhouettes to her. This got me thinking about the title of my dress, “Conquered and Divided,” which I chose to illustrate the conflict between human cells and nature cells. After that conversation, I was riffing with my family and someone mentioned “Not A Storybook Ending” as an alternate title. I realized that my dress did have a storybook quality to it– the bright pink and green background, the swooping colors, the organic shapes, and the princess lines. Ms. Gibson even commented on the size and sculptural nature of it at the first rehearsal, “It’s like a child’s play structure!” I started to think about how I could capitalize on this storybook style to further emphasize the point I wanted to make about the relationship between humans and nature.
I have now decided that over the summer, I want to make an alternate set of silhouettes out of bright colored paper. These scenes will show abundant nature life and some kind of harmony between humans and nature (I haven’t decided the extent to which I want to include humans in these images). I will photograph the dress with these colorful silhouettes and then juxtapose the photos with the version of the dress that has the black silhouettes. I am also going to add an expanding array or swarm of black beans that creeps up the dress like an infection.
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