Miniature, 2018

Memoria: the medieval craft of memory.

In miniature, these costume pieces of ties and pulls, together yet apart, become even more fragile and transient. They require a close gaze, a wondering of what narratives this small figure is telling in their inanimate nature.

This installation is a series on process. Thoughts, plans, attempts and patterns pin on the wall behind the little figure, hinting at the contortion behind the scenes. The series of process deconstructs the joint between the absolute control of making costumes for a miniature mannequin, and the chaos of it’s difficulty and surreal scale.

These eerie investigations of scale and reality play back into the study of Memoria. The 14th century craft of memory, or Memoria, is a practice where changing memories when you remember them was encouraged and developed upon, as well as curating a system of remembering. Controlling the memories, as in crafting the act of remembering and the memory itself, in result actually creates a certain chaos. One can't know which memories or remembering is truly authentic and shared.

Though these costume items are made the same way life size ones are, with tunnels for pulling strings and gussets between fingers, they are inanimate to the life-sized versions. In an effort to maintain control I made miniature costumes, only to find that they were tricky little gestures of the life sized application. With more control came more difficulty, my big thumbs fumbling over fabric thumbs the size of a pea. Their reality is foggy, imbued in an exhausting process of controlling hands, and their concept steps in between the crafted experience I puppeteer and the strong current of their reality.