“The Dyeing Dress” published in Art Monthly Australia, issue #246, December 2011-February 2012
- ️https://unimelb.academia.edu/StellaGray
Related papers
Death Becomes Her: On the Progressive Potential of Victorian Mourning
Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 41, no. 4, 2013
University of Texas – Pan American On the occasion of her Golden Jubilee, Queen Victoria was depicted in a woodcut by William Nicholson that was to become extremely popular (Figure 1). So stout that her proportions approach those of a cube, the Queen is dressed from top to toe in her usual black mourning attire, the white of her gloved hands punctuating the otherwise nearly solid black rectangle of her body. Less than thirty years later, another simple image of a woman in black would prove to be equally iconic: the lithe, narrow column of Chanel's black dress (Figure 2). Comparing the dresses depicted in the two images – the first a visual reminder of the desexualized stolidity of Victorian fidelity, the second image an example of women's burgeoning social and sexual liberation – might lead one to conclude that the only thing they have in common is the color black. And yet, twentieth- and twenty-first-century fashion historians suggest that Victorian mourning is the direct antecedent of the sexier fashions that followed. Jill Fields writes, for example, that “the move to vamp black became possible because the growing presence of black outerwear for women in the nineteenth century due to extensive mourning rituals merged with the growing sensibility that dressing in black was fashionable” (144). Valerie Mendes is more direct: “Traditional mourning attire blazed a trail for the march of fashionable black and the little black dress” (9). These are provocative claims given that most scholarly accounts of Victorian mourning attire – whether from the perspective of literary analysis, fashion history or theory, or social history or theory – offer no indication that such progressive possibilities were inherent in widows’ weeds. Instead, those accounts focus almost exclusively on chasteness and piety, qualities required of the sorrowful widow, as the only message communicated by her attire: “Widows’ mourning clothes announced the ongoing bonds of fidelity, dependence, and grieving that were expected to tie women to their dead husbands for at least a year” (Bradbury 289). The disparity in the two accounts raises the question: how could staid, cumbersome black Victorian mourning attire lead to dresses understood to embrace sexuality and mobility?
2016
This research project examines the language of grief in textile art practice. It takes as its starting point the idea that, as individuals with experience of bereavement, we may carry with us an element of unresolved mourning. This is not the pathological condition of melancholia or complicated mourning, nor the fully resolved, completed state where mourning is over, but is a space between; a set of emotions which continue to be felt and may be brought to the surface by an event, situation, set of circumstances or encounter with, for example, artwork which may bring back feelings of grief and loss long after the death of someone close. This project investigates how cloth can be used in textile artwork to make a connection with this unresolved mourning and thereby contribute to the progression of the viewer’s work of mourning. The aims of the research are to explore how textile art can be used as a metaphor for grief and mourning and to consider how the staining and mending of cloth ...
Objects of Immortality: Hairwork and Mourning in Victorian Visual Culture
Proceedings of the Art of Death and Dying Symposium, 2013
Often misunderstood as purely an artifact of mourning, hairwork was exchanged as a living, sentimental token of love and friendship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hair was an artifact of affection and a material for memory, and was often made into hairwork objects and jewelry. This function of hairwork can be understood in the context of the visual culture of death and dying in the nineteenth century, which equated beauty with immortality. This paper will show that sentimental hairwork was inextricably linked to portraiture, even when it was not tied to the miniature portrait. For those who created it, hairwork had the capacity to reconstruct the body into an ideal form that could live beyond death.
"Forget Me Not – The Use of Real and Fake Photographs in Victorian Mourning Practices"
In the Victorian era, photography was relatively a new invention which was taking over the paintings of the time to give a true picture of what is, rather than an interpretation. Spirit photography became the new medium of Memento Mori becoming the new vogue of the Victorian age even though this practice was seen as fraud. It wasn’t long before the ‘photographic artists’ were using skills of painters to manipulate photographs and the actual magical process was being diluted for self gain not for artistry yet the Victorians saw photographs as an aid to mourning and memory not as artistry.
Drowned Angels and Watery Graves: Representations of Female Suicide in Victorian Art
Via Panorâmica, 2018
The theme of the fallen woman finding salvation in death was a popular topic in Victorian art and literature, especially during the mid-Victorian era. From the fiction of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens to realistic paintings, the myth of the fallen woman had a strong presence. In this article, I will focus on artistic representations of the fallen woman, such as John Everett Millais's Ophelia and Augustus Egg's Past and Present triptych and discuss the importance of Williams Shakespeare's Ophelia and Thomas Hood's poem "The Bridge of Sighs" for the conception of this mythical figure. I will also argue that, despite these artists' efforts to mercifully portray the fallen women, in the end, they reinforced a Victorian patriarchal discourse, which regarded women as physically and intellectually weaker than men, while mythologizing this transgressing figure, created in order to remind all women of the fate they could expect if they defied the idealized conception of femininity imposed by society.
CO–OPTING THE CRINOLINE: NEO–VICTORIAN FEMINISM AND THE POLITICS OF APPROPRIATIVE MOURNING
The latter years of the twentieth century saw the flourishing of a literary sub– genre that has come to be known as neo–Victorianism. Engaged in a project of rewriting, reconstructing or rediscovering the nineteenth century, these novels often identify themselves as direct descendents of postmodernist fiction. They display a self–conscious awareness of the constructedness of history and historiography, self–reflexivity, and a tendency towards ludic intertextuality, all characteristics of what Linda Hutcheon has called ‘historiographic metafiction’ (‘Pastime’ 474), now itself an indispensable term. Such fiction, Hutcheon notes, ‘problematize(s) the entire question of historical knowledge’ (‘Pastime’ 474), and it is this which differentiates it from ‘straight’ or ‘representative’ historical fiction, a genre of which the Victorians themselves were particularly fond. Emerging, as it has, from theoretical discourses shaped by the radicalisation of gender politics that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, and looking back as it does to a period now primarily remembered for a repressive social and moral orthodoxy (which, of course, tends to elide its many incipient ‘liberal’ sensibilities), neo–Victorian fiction has proven fertile soil for latter– twentieth century feminist authors and critics. Coming after modernism’s drive to, as Simon Joyce suggests, ‘define the Victorian period and thereby to declare it definitively nonmodern and utterly dead’ (qtd in Krueger xv), postmodernist engagement with the era has sought to resurrect the politically sensitive past in order to examine and interrogate it. For some feminists, this endeavour has been tied to a sense of a discovery of the loss of heritage: a forgotten, incomplete or unconsummated process of mourning for feminine creative precursors.
Art_Textiles, 2015
Focusing on ideas of repetition and repair, this short essay looks at the close relationship between cloth, memory and loss. While photography captures a split moment, cloth and clothing hold time differently - retaining our imprint over continuous time. We might even say that cloth is a kind of memory, embodied and material. In exploring these ideas, the essay also looks at parallels between the making of art and the process of mourning. Might a work of art perform ‘the work of mourning’, as described by Freud in his essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’?
Crosses, Cloaks and Globes: Women’s Material Culture of Mourning on the Brittany Coast
2009
Rural women living on the coast of Brittany, from the mid-nineteenth to midtwentieth centuries, countered loss of life and social change with mourning rituals and objects that had local and temporal meanings. Three things, the funerary proëlla cross, the widow's cloak, and the marriage globe, marked rites of passage and served as repositories of individual memory, whether interred, worn, or displayed in the home. The material significance of these objects is place-specific: they come from a relatively austere culture, a maritime peasant world of thrift, poverty, and self-reliance. In many forms of visual and literary representation, these objects have come to stand as emblematic of the bodily experience of loss in the communities of the Brittany coast. In this essay, from the perspective of an art historian, I investigate representations of these three things within a rural culture of remembrance, longing, and mourning. The social processes of mourning and memorializing loss in which these objects functioned were quite different from the quick working through of grief that the post-industrial culture of psychotherapy requires. As part of a complex negotiation of memory and personal history, these material objects of mourning can be read as having a sort of activated agency that served to negotiate physical distance within the family and to make gender identities (often locally specific) appear ever more natural and fixed. In my analysis of representations of the cross, cloak, and globe, I depart from Foucauldianinflected visual studies that view representations of provincial culture as a set of commodities that have been culturally encoded and packaged for urban consumers. 1 There is a somewhat cynical incompleteness to such arguments that does not leave any room for multiple and shifting experiences articulated-in part-through bodily experience. A feminist focus on lived experiences such as maternal desire, melancholic longing, and the process of mourning shifts the discussion of provincial material culture away from w w w. a s h g a t e. c o m w w w. a s h g a t e. c o m w w w. a s h g a t e. c o m w w w. a s h g a t e. c o m w w w. a s h g a t e. c o m w w w. a s h g a t e. c o m w w w. a s h g a t e. c o m w w w. a s h g a t e .
In considering the funeral practices in the reign of Victoria, a number of questions are raised: why did Victorians choose to ritualize death, what were the rituals in which they engaged, what were the outward trappings of mourning, and how and where did they dispose of the deceased. It can be argued that during Queen Victoria’s long reign, the celebration of death reached its peak, which raises the further question of the degree to which the death, funeral, and grieving for Prince Albert affected the pattern of British mourning.This paper seeks to consider the various elements of mourning and funerals during the Victorian Era.