Cathryn Mallory | “Adorned Constraint”
Published: January 27, 2011
By Caroline Patterson
Stand far away from Cathryn Mallory’s dress sculpture, “Ritual of Beauty,” you see a lovely but wild silver evening dress, with its draped skirt and sculpted bodice. Then look more closely: the bodice is a chaotic jumble of perforated metal curlers, hair clips, and metal found objects, held together by wire mesh; the skirt shaped of stiff wire mesh.
From Jan. 18 to April 3, Mallory’s exhibition “Adorned Constraint” will be on display at the Holter Museum’s High Gallery in Helena.
“Ritual of Beauty” – with its graceful shape and unyielding metal texture – illustrates Mallory’s fascination with beauty and burden. While its lines are elegant, its weight implies constraint; burdening the imaginary wearer, pinning her to the ground.
Another piece, “Deep Sleep,” features a dress designed with wire mesh, copper wire, and lead weights. “Hoist,” a halter-dress sculpture made of shiny, tangled copper wire that hangs down from a wooden pulley, will be retooled to hang from the High Gallery’s high ceilings.
Mallory, the current director of the University of Montana’s Gallery of Visual Arts, says this idea of beauty and burden grew from her fascination with 17th and 18th century fashion – the high collars, richly embellished dresses, and the opulent fabrics.
“This work is inspired from historical references to Elizabethan styles of dress, as well as contemporary fashion. The dresses are more figurative, while the collars are more ambiguous and conceptual,” says Mallory. “Both explore psychological notions of entrapment and oppression through adornment and embellishment.”
Mallory says, too, she is fascinated by how dress and adornment define social structure, ritual and identity. Using unusual materials, such as wire, metal curlers and recycled tires, Mallory’s work emphasizes the female form while at the same time emphasizing the weight of the garment itself.
“It refers to weight in the sense of the physical and emotional weight,” she says. “It has to with the sense that beauty is holding you in place.”
To see examples of Mallory’s work, visit cathrynmallory.com; for more information on the Holter, see www.holtermuseum.org.
