Page 135 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

COLLECTING LOSS 129

‘The dresses were worn by Elin O’Hara Slavick and her sisters to Mass, to school, to
birthday parties and to family gatherings.’
Source Elin O’Hara Slavick, A Wall of Incoherent Dresses, 1991. Collection of the artist.
Trained as a photographer, Slavick has reconstructed her childhood, not with
photographs, but in response to photography. (As Susan Sontag writes in On
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Photography, ‘Now all art aspires to the condition of photography.’ ) Slavick
sees the dresses as photographs of how she remembers her body:
The work is informed…primarily by my own small memory of being a
girl. An investigation of my childhood produces a synthesis of distorted
memory, my real history, and my adult desire to interpret and remember.
Poetic and confessional texts are sewn in the dresses that my mother saved
since my childhood. Each dress becomes a surrogate of my body, a
photograph of the memory of my body. The absence of actual
photographic imagery of that body implies the loss of multiple bodies; the
hiding body, the invisible body and the dead child body which we all
possess within our adult selves. 22