I began exhibiting work inspired by author Patricia Eakins’s story “The Hungry Girls” in 2011. I am drawn to experimentation and play – therefore, I responded to this project with the desire to pursue new directions and make work that was intentionally studio driven, “indoor gallery art.” 

These installations profoundly changed the direction and materials of my work. “The Hungry Girls” is a fable of the grotesque: in their insatiable hunger, girls consume everything in sight, including dirt (a strong connection for me), and once pregnant, the daughters they carry eat their mothers from the inside out. In the story the girls fight over a nightgown, and this garment became the focus of my work. I made a series of nine 10’ tall dresses to represent the Hungry Girls, rendered from raw Navajo Churro fleeces nuno-felted into cloth. I manipulated each giant dress with markings of dirt, rips, cuts, and exaggerated hand stitching, which attempts to repair the gashes. I wanted the fabrication of these dresses to bear the description of the women’s wild and insatiable condition. For one dress, I followed an impulse to cut the dress in half vertically and suspended the two halves with just a small slit of space between them. The effect was a startling allusion to childbirth and its violence.

I first heard the story of “The Hungry Girls” when I was very pregnant with my first child. What stayed with me was the fact that, like these famished, pregnant women, I was not in control of what was happening to me or to my body in my pregnancy. In pregnancy, deeper, primal forces are in control as opposed to our conscious will. Pregnancy, that is, the gestation of new life is primal and biological, durational and utterly uncontrollable.