In 2019 I completed a wallpaper installation for the Wedding Cake House. The Wedding Cake House is the former home and dress shop of the Tirocchi Sisters- female designers and entrepreneurs that flourished in Providence during the early twentieth century. Wardrobes, materials, records, and ephemera collected within this remarkable Victorian mansion were donated to the RISD Museum in 1989, forming the most comprehensive archive of a custom dressmaking shop ever. Culling images from this archive, I created a wallpaper design on pattern-dot paper layering prints of deconstructed garments with images of workers in everyday life. I am intrigued by how labor and fashion inform identity-construction, and see cloth as situated at an intersection where women can be both constrained by gender roles and active producers of change. These women were shaped by- and shaping- the patterns of their time. Opening May 2019, The Wedding Cake House will be a feminist artist residency project and extension of the Dirt Palace, a feminist arts collective based in Providence since 2000. It will be home to more than 50 permanent artist installations. My wallpaper is installed in the future resident reading room, the former sewing workshop. Pictured above are the some of the Tirocchi’s seamstresses on a holiday outing to Narragansett.
Sewing Room, 2019. Silkscreen and carbon transfer on pattern-dot paper.