Genie Maples

My Falling Flying Dress is a morphing large insanely intricately stitched assembly piece that started as I worked to make sense of my grief after losing my teenage son to suicide. 

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The initial sections were built of pieces of his clothing and small belongings. As the piece continues to evolve, with sections included and removed, other fiber pieces swallowed in or birthed out into separate pieces, this work outlines the cartography of my explorations traversing the repeated process of shattering that is the nature of any true catastrophe. 

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Every true catastrophe is a magnet for catastrophic aftershock. Shatterings leave shards in their wake.

 

It's a conscious choice to work at stitching beauty and meaning into wholeness in the wake utterly shattering events, and it's something that can't be accomplished once and set aside. It's a way of life. I would argue that it's the one way of life open to me as I continue to choose living over dying myself.