Building the Bird's Nest Dress, progress notes 2: Do, undo, redo

Because the process of the Bird's Nest Dress is free-form, I've had to rework the structure of certain parts several times. Here are some pics of the uninterrupted progress:

Building the Bird’s Nest Dress, progress notes 1: We won’t play your distinctions between nature and culture

Barbara Kruger, We Won't Play Nature to Your Culture

I began the Bird's Nest Dress free-weaving project a few years ago in tandem with the Figleaf Loincloth under the intention of joining the two pieces together into one garment. The Bird's Nest Dress with Figleaf was to be one in an ongoing series called "Wardrobe for Paradise."

In the series, I was playing with nostalgia and the Edenic myth as it relates to the female body, to (what I consider) a misguided notion of "returning to nature," to modesty, suffering, clothing, hair and covering.

In the Bird's Nest and Figleaf pieces in particular, I wanted to make connections between two different processes of free-associative weaving and speak to how organized activities – whether they be the repeated motions of birds or humans – result in binding disparate elements together and in building protective coverings. I was thinking of the nest as a place to lay eggs (not to mention a derogatory term for female pubic hair) and of the fig leaf as this trope in Western painting used to cover female genitalia (and hair).

Though it's customary to associate weaving (or building in general) with the inception of human cultures, I'm interested in the similarities between human weaving and other animal weaving in much the same way I'm interested in similarities between dendritic forms of both trees and freeways. I don't see the two as distinct or oppositional, which I think ultimately unveils my progressive hopefulness in the ultimate outcome of human evolution.

Pictures from stage 1 of the Bird's Nest Dress: