"When I was engaged many years ago, I thought I might like to wear my mother's wedding dress, and even had it altered to bring it up to date, but ultimately realized that it was 'her' dress, imbued with her story and that mine ought be my own. In resurrecting this dress today, many years later, it has become a current metaphor for personal sovereignty and 'self-marriage'. The dress has been embellished with stitched words mined from a daily channeled writing ritual, and a running collection of inherited maternal wisdoms from my family's and others' wise and eccentric matriarchs. These ‘milk lines', inner directives and divine downloads, represent a process of personal discernment, re-patterning and rebalancing. What do I choose to revere and reuse and what can I release and rewrite? What might be nursed back to health through reconnection the sacred? Little glass bottles rescued from the fires of a defunct dairy farm in Lac St Jean (once used to sample and test the quality of the milk) are repurposed here to collect these archetypal adages that are a kind of braille of the spirit."

Materials: Altered wedding dress worn by the artist’s mother, milk collection bottles from farm in rural Quebec, stitched cotton, collected adages.

2023