1001 Funny Things You can do with a Skirt

The work for 1001 Funny Things began as research on the history and mythology of the skirt.

Writer Elizabeth Dancoes has done brief, original stories based on our research but in contemporary idiom.
In total we have worked together on approximately 10 stories, The images and stories are based on the ancient, mysterious gesture known as “Anasyrma”, literally “to raise the skirt”. The origins of this intriguing gesture come to light in the Demeter, Persephone story from Ancient Greece. The gesture haunts so much of subsequent mythology and story that it can hardly be ignored.
Anasyrma (“to raise the skirt”) was an incitement to transformation. And while its spiritual implications were deep, it encouraged laughter as a conduit to renewal. It resonates in fables in the guise of mysterious things concealed beneath a woman’s skirt and continues into modern times with the ever-present and compelling image of Marilyn Monroe’s skirts billowing over a subway grate. As anyone who as ever work a skirt will tell you it is a spontaneous gesture.

My work for the series includes drawings, paintings and embroideries as well as digital images that are made to resemble embroidery and traditional stitchery.
For me this work reflects my intense emotional, expressive involvement in cloth, in sewing and stitching cloth, in interpreting cloth in paint and in pure, unadulterated, long hand stitching, the stitch as a teller of tales taking in and speaking with each breath, with each passing of thread through cloth.

Though the images reflect the humour and magic of Elizabeth’s stories, it was the sharing of our respective experiencing of the gesture of “Anasyrma” that inevitably inspired the revelations that inform the visual notions that run through both text and image. We initially worked simultaneously on the evolution of one set of image and story then she wrote for my drawings, as we evolved Elizabeth wrote and I interpreted. Part of our desire for this work it to share the methods and means of this ongoing, productive collaboration.