Enough Considered Project
Enough Considered
This series of stitched samplers, photographic portraits and other participatory actions and collaborations, mines ENOUGH’s multiplicity of meanings, inviting reflection on wholeness, abundance, boundaries, sufficiency.
I began the ENOUGH Considered project with a series of stitched samplers that are based on traditional Victorian alphabet samplers, created by girls as a means of simultaneously learning the material skills of stitching and the non-material skills of language, religious devotion, and femininity. Young women who had the privilege of learning to read and write in English were taught with thread on cloth, while ink and paper were reserved for boys.
Each of samplers I create incrementally labors to highlight aspects of ENOUGH that call for attention. Through tedious efforts of cross-stitch, a cryptic system of “speaking” emerges. ENOUGH is found buried within the alphabet of the sampler or fading into the dark linen background. The word at first appears as a deliberate, yet quiet visual whisper, then evolves with bolder contrast and new content as the series continues.
Seeking to deepen the exploration of how this synthesis between material/corporeal/somatic and the non-material/language/rhetoric could produce new expressions of ENOUGH, I began a collaboration with photographer Lisa Levine in 2019. Working together, our early studio sessions were inquiries into the body as site holding stories that have been unspoken, ignored, unaddressed, unconsidered. We soon opened the portrait sessions to broader participation. Each new participant becomes a third collaborator in the process. Each contributor writes and talks reflectively about ENOUGH and then chooses a stamp to apply directly to their body. Locating the word physically on the body is a starting point for an embodied gesture of ENOUGH, a means of healing an old wound or violation, a message of boundaries/protection or a means of sanctifying one’s own sense of abundance.
In samplers and photographic portraits ENOUGH can become embodied and encrypted, benign or rebellious, leaving open-ended questions about what is spoken and what is hidden in plain sight.
