Photograph by Kalin Haydon, Courtesy of Craft Alliance
Sculptor Stephanie Liner grew up in North Carolina. During her teens, the last of the region’s famous textile mills shuttered. She noticed because her family worked in the fabric and furniture industries, which is why she has always known how to sew; when she studied art at the North Carolina State College of Design, she focused on textiles as well as sculpture. And as a grad student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she took a break from working on her MFA and apprenticed at an upholstery workshop, The Straight Thread, deconstructing and reconstructing sofas and library chairs, stuffing them with horsehair or coir, and hand-sewing the welting.
“I would build those things as if I were building a dress—but build them with wood,” Liner says.
That connection between fabric, handmade furniture, and clothing eventually evolved into “Momentos of a Doomed Construct,” which was part of “40 under 40: Craft Futures” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery in 2012. The exhibit is currently showing at Craft Alliance’s Grand Center Gallery as part of its Fashion Lab series. The sculptures, which Liner calls “orbs,” start with a skeleton of plywood, which is then stuffed and upholstered, the exterior as well as the interior chamber. Each one takes up to a year to complete. The 9-foot piece at the front of the Craft Alliance gallery is covered in a bright, busy flower pattern, a reproduction of a traditional Waverly fabric from Virginia; a knob invites you to open a panel on the front. Now, there’s a mannequin inside of it, but on opening night, it was inhabited by a living woman, hair teased high, who sat quite still, because her skirt was part of the interior upholstery.
“I use patterns as a way to overtake the body and to merge the body with a piece of furniture,” Liner says. “In nature, women are objects, we’re vessels—that’s just what we are made to be. But there is a line where that is a good objectification and where it’s a bad one. I think every woman knows that line. So I set up this situation between the viewer and the viewed, where the voyeur has some power, but the woman inside can use eye contact and body language to interact with you in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable.” (The show includes a series of photographs of the orbs inhabited with live models, so if you missed the opening, you can get a sense of what the orbs feel like when they’re activated by a human presence.)
Though “Momentos” (that misspelling is intentional) deeply ponders feminine identity, it also examines it in relation to the masculine. A “360 piece,” attached to a temporary wall, has an outfacing half quilted in two colors of the same Robert Allen fabric. Liner says she wanted that side to look “full, plush, almost like a piece of ripe fruit,” to represent the feminine. Walk around the back, and you’ll see exposed plywood ribs, zigzagging red stitches and wires, representing the hands-on masculine aspect, which, as long as it is doing and making, need not worry so much about looking perfect. Weighing more than 100 pounds, the orb requires the use of a tiny crane for assembly.
“I actually used the makeup table as the inspiration for this,” she says of the exposed feminine half of the piece. “You’re looking at her, and she’s looking at you—she’s a portrait, and you’re a portrait, as if you are looking in a mirror.”
The final sculpture in the show is lower to the ground—the model is forced to recline, and the viewer must get down on hands and knees to peer inside. Rather than a bright floral fabric, the exterior is covered in black sequins, like a cross between a mysterious fruit and a goth disco ball.
“It’s about flipping sexuality inside out and exposing the lingerie,” Liner says. “I also think about these as rooms in a space, so, like, there’s the front room interior, and this is more about the bedroom. You have to get low down and really engage.” (Do that, and you’ll see not just a woman, but also a tiny chandelier wired through the top of the sphere. Liner calls this piece Cherry Bomb.)
Her orbs riff on a number of themes: the loss of craft and industry in America; feminine identity and worth; aging; plastic surgery; the relationship between fashion and interior design; the value of making things by hand. Liner says these sculptures also sprang from her research on the House of Fabergé, the jewelry firm that designed tiny, hollow jeweled eggs for the Russian tsars. “They were these amazing crafted, tiny objects,” she says. “They were extravagant and useless, which I relate to the media, and celebrities, and our ideas about sexuality.” But though she’s a person who likes to think deeply as well as make things, she’s no preacher. “I’m not making a judgment call about what’s wrong, or that you shouldn’t be objectified,” she says. “But how do you find a place in that? I’m trying to figure that out myself. I’m just saying we need to think about it…and that these questions need to be asked.”
“Stephanie Liner: Momentos of a Doomed Construct” runs through January at Craft Alliance (Kranzberg Arts Center, 510 N. Grand, 314-534-7528, craftalliance.org).
