Dorothy struggled during the early years of her career to throw off the association of her preferred practice of sculpting with a rigid art form, liberatingly embracing the characteristics and richness of fabric—soft, pliable, imbued with a tensile strength.
The body of works presented here comes from explorations and ideas drawn from Dorothy’s observations of nature and human interactions within society, portraying parasitic and predatorial encroachment in realms, spaces, and domains.
These observations have led her to focus on migration or movement as a reaction to one’s situation.
In particular, Dorothy presents the ‘pillow’ installations with these regular and amorphous shapes as refuge stations. In her world, she allows her work to metamorphose, to assume the shape of the space it occupies, becoming an organic organism. Not unlike a scientist in a laboratory, she cannot help but shape these pillows to fit into the ‘perfect’ world she craves.
Might this be a quest of fruitlessness? Why attempt to curtail natural movements of organisms? In this interconnected universe, why do we seek to stake a claim? How do you define a boundary in space? Dare we define or claim a space? Do we stop to ask if we are in a temporal space, custodians only for a time? May we perhaps be the ones overextending our time and place?
‘The Jute Sack Has Life.’
Dorothy’s statement evokes an image of a semi-lifeless object being resuscitated with desperation. However, she alludes to the constant rebirth the jute sack undergoes within various contexts that she has encountered it.
With family members, neighbors, artists, and casual workers, Dorothy brings all actors into a choreographed act—involved in a ritual repetitive manipulation of the materials to continue this life-giving transformation. Like a pantomime, the sacks assume identities—even fake ones she has created to mirror everyday experiences.
Dorothy is confronting the notion of identity, conforming to presumed societal norms, and fitting in.
The coded sacks play a dual purpose of including and excluding the viewer, because of entrenched societal norms which are enforced and cannot be questioned. These are serious issues confronting individuals on a daily basis—issues which may determine your livelihood and future.
She leaves the objective viewer to decide whether to be radical enough to confront the perpetuation of norms, which may even be farcical or empty, or to play the game.