Installation at A/D: B Project Space in Brooklyn
Curated by Catherine Morris
The book Writing a Woman’s Life by Carolyn Heilbrun was the inspiration for a series of works collectively called Lady Furniture. Heilbrun posits that a written biography is perhaps not the medium best suited to describe a woman’s life. This furniture is an attempt to investigate the built form of women’s lives. These pieces are tributes to admirable women in the arts. These women’s lives and their relationships were researched through biographical and anecdotal material. The form of the furniture has been an attempt to distill their accomplishments, their relationships, and their relationships to their work.
Love Seats for Virginia Woolf was the second series of Lady Furniture. Love Seats is a biography of Woolf, illustrating the relationships with those closest to her: Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, and Vita Sackville-West. These people were Woolf’s extended family, and these pieces describe their dependency on each other to get work done – to get better work done. Her relationships were very egalitarian. That is why the chairs are all white and why there is no bigger and smaller seat.
The exhibition creates a series of rooms for each of the pieces through the use of color. The color was derived from an examination of Charleston, the house shared by those in the Bloomsbury group. The application of color questioned the traditional boundary of wall and floor, and defined the space of the furniture without resorting to the construction of walls.
Photos by Caleb Crawford
