When I first began preparing for this installation, my renderings were colorful, and the tone of the work, light. By fall of 2017, however, those plans felt completely out of step with the state of the world and with my own internal rhythms, so I shelved them. Instead, I leaned into a palpable need to draw from a place that was more contemplative and with bite.

Each of the 2 featured panels started off as a small-scale collage. I chopped and resized and shuffled my Victorian-era source materials …fantastically fragile women fainting and scarlet women shunned, passive nudes in ethereal landscapes... I thought about our history as women and the incessant recurrence of having our bodies objectified, brutalized, and presided over by men, and our voices— creativity, intellect, emotions, financial agency— stifled. This deceptively simple kneeling figure was able to hold a spectrum of experience for me and to express a quietly complex and excruciating feeling. I didn't want to leave her alone in a window in Olneyville Square, though. I had this sense of responsibility to her. So I created the image of a man, being lifted by the cool and examining feminine hand, muffled by a lacy handkerchief. Not without humor and it's own contradictions, presenting him there as an emotional counterweight balanced the piece.

I am grateful to the Dirt Palace as a space where it was safe for me to unpack new narrative content and to spend a few days working out my relationship with new materials, primarily light. As I worked to resolve the piece in the window, voices of the 2017 #MeToo movement broke on social media and were rising up on global news platforms. I was grounded during this cultural moment by the experience of creating art in an empowering feminist space, and honored to share this work at a radical arts institution in our city.