Medium: silk wedding dress, cyanotype chemistry, wax forms, shoju paper, lights

This piece was made specifically for the second year PhD student show at the Triangle Space, Chelsea College of Art. The work came out of my thinking around the similarities between a marriage contract and the legal processes of adoption as both share the idea of the transfer of one human from one kind of family into another. I am both an adoptee and a married woman. Each of these states have to some extent, disrupted my own sense of who I am and fundamentally altered the ways in which people understand me and what I signify. Both adoption and marriage are symbolic beginnings for individuals who already have their own history. Both require a legal process and contract that sets out a new state and negates what went before. 

This work is a further development of ideas that were explored during a residency in 2021 at The Nose, Walton on the Naze. I used the properties of the cyanotype process to produce a short film that explicitly took the chemical possibilities of the cyanotype process in narrative.