CLOTHING CLOTH CLOUGH January 27 2024

Mina Angelene Sheary and Forrest William (Bill) Clough, June 13, 1950.

Fifty years ago, after moving from Oregon to Alaska, at my request, my mother sent me her wedding dress with the admonition that it was worthless because of the stains. I had a fantasy of wearing her dress when I got married (the first time, 1977). Turns out her waistline at age 17 was way smaller than mine at 25. The dress stayed in a trunk for 30 years until I moved again, from Alaska to Colorado.

Brenda Roper and the wedding dress reimagined.

I gifted the dress to my Santa Fe based artist friend, Brenda Roper, whose artwork often utilizes vintage clothing to inform her investigations of “social relationships, identity, family secrets, and feminism.” I wrote a blog about it in 2012 titled “Giving Away the Bride, Giving Away the Dress….Or….how artists will make art out of most anything!”

Nard and I loading the dress to relocate from Santa Fe to Colorado Springs.

Roper embellished the dress with bells and buttons and reshaped it sculpturally on a vintage metal dress form. She exhibited it but always with a “NFS” tag even though I insisted it was perfectly fine to pass it on. Eight years later, in March of 2020, Roper needed to downsize, and so the dress in its new form came back to me to live in my Colorado Springs studio.

Colorado Springs based visual artist, Wendy Mike, adopts the wedding dress.

And then in 2023, it was my turn to downsize when Nard and I made the surprise decision to move to Oregon. And yet another caretaker/guardian took custody, Colorado Springs artist and friend, Wendy Mike.

One month ago, the woman who first owned that dress, my mother, Mina Angeline Clough, died at age 90, of complications from dementia.

The passing of a parent gives pause and reflection on one's own progress through life, especially when there is a house full of 90 years of accumulation to deal with.

In her cedar hope chest, a cultural relic in and of itself, I discovered her bridal veil. A piece of the wedding dress ensemble that I hadn't asked for or received in 1977. I brought it home and it now lives on the cardboard cutout of “me” I gave to mom a few years ago hoping seeing my image daily would help her remember she had a daughter named Sheary. I dressed it up with my father's bowling team shirt that I also found in the hope chest.

The significance of all this wedding dress's travels and why I feel compelled to write about the journey this dress has taken is still unclear to me. Part and parcel of the process of considering one's own mortality after a parent's passing, I'm sure. Intertwined with measures of time, movement, and spaces within, and without.

FLIGHT OF THE INNOCENTS (People Move)

INNOCENT #1 This installation of seven suspended sculptures conceptualizes the impact of climate change on women and children forced to flee from homelands impacted by drought and flood.
Reclaimed vintage baby dress sourced from Who Gives A Scrap, encaustic, hand waxed threads, hand stitched embroidery, wire,18 x14 x 13 (+22” descending threads). Available December 2021 from Kreuser Gallery.

An apropos quote I discovered while reviewing my personal 1991 journal written by Ralph Ellison, pg 85, “The Second Black Renaissance:”
“Flight is an inherently ambiguous term, connecting freedom and desertion alike.”

People Move. They move for many reasons. They always have.

In the USA, we're lucky. We have big space, big options, to move for any reason...jobs, family, personal preferences regarding city vs. country, ocean vs desert vs mountains vs prairies.

In the last two years, how many people do you know who have moved? I have friends who have moved from Alaska to here (Colorado Springs), from here to Phoenix, from here to Washington state, from NYC to here.

In other parts of the world, people must cross borders to move the distances we Americans take for granted as possibilities. Ken Burn's film “The Dust Bowl” documents the man-made ecological disaster that precipitated the mass migrations of the 1930's. For instance, Colorado farmers from the San Luis Valley moved north to the mountains become miners. And for generations in America, families have moved “up,” seeking safer neighborhoods to raise their children.

In most of the world, people are born into families that reside in small geographic countries in which climate change has impacted their ability to raise the traditional crops that sustained their ancestors. As Mother Nature demonstrates that climate change is here to stay, the impacts on a population's ability to survive a location with flooding or famine will continue to create climate refugees.

Bottom line: People don't just naturally want to pick up and abandon the place they've lived for generations without good reason. The artificial borders we define as countries are barriers that kill.

Women and children, the innocents, are fleeing countries not because they want to live in another country, but because they must, for survival. It's a problem without an answer.

Solutions can only begin once we understand that these climate refugees are acting out of desperation rather than criminality.

Raising awareness of the global refugee crisis through Art. The full installation provided a visual way to process the enormity of 25 million – the approximate number of refugees estimated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees when this project commenced.My contribution to the international collaborative art project, “25 Million Stitches.”