“A hole is a really beautiful form,” says artist Anne Wilson. “It’s very
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She began her “Disrepair/Disperse” series after her mother gave her a large collection of family linens. Some were two generations old, and many had holes in them. “This cloth had connections for me to formality and propriety,” she says. “Linens are used at formal dinners.” Because of these associations, Wilson says, “a hole or a bit of hair on this cloth would be quite undesirable.” So she uses black thread to stitch strands of hair around the edges of the holes, binding up the frayed edge along with the hair. But she also stitches into other parts of the fabric, “sometimes to reinforce it where it has weakened, sometimes to hold down that unruly hair that wouldn’t bind to the hole’s edge, and sometimes based on how it looks.” The results are beautiful and creepy–the white fabric flecked with black seems both elegant and dirty. Wilson says these pieces remind her of astronomical and microscopic images, cigarette burns, orifices of the body.
Recently she began setting up a Web site that will become an archive of the answers people gave when she asked how they felt about haircutting and hair loss. “I’m interested in playing out these issues and ideas using new technologies,” she says. “I’m not always a mad stitcher.”
