EVE IS LEAVING THE GARDEN is a performance costume piece featuring a large chainmail dress made of 20,000 pop tabs. When completed with the dress, I will walk through various public gardens extremely slowly, repeatedly re-imagining Eve's exit from the garden of Eden.

 

The piece reimagines the biblical Eve's first garment not as a designation of sin/'the fall'/shame  (a haphazard fig leaf covering to obscure her shame), but as a designation of protection, grandiosity, and mobility (a giant, intricate, loud dress of armor). The piece reframes garments not as a coverup for sin, but as a resource for augmenting, protecting, transforming, and imagining new realities for our bodies. This possibility was never offered to Eve; her body was rigidly defined as a supplement to Adam and a childbearing body from the beginning of her creation. ARMOR IN EDEN gives Eve the opportunity to refigure her body while exiting Eden; this is not a shameful exile.

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I view the monotonous process of making the dress is a performance in and of itself, in an era where any activity that is not efficient, 'useful,' or productive is stigmatized (slow handcrafting is particularly feminized and thus designated as less useful). Our obsession with quick, constant output is detrimental to the planet (e.g. the waste of the fast fashion industry) and to our wellbeing (e.g. the way our time and experiences are increasingly monetized). Thus, I am trying to perceive my making of this dress not as an act of shame, indulgence, and failure, but rather one of power, just like the way Eve might want to wear this dress.