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» August 5 » 2008
Inside Out
Artist Lalie Douglas, whose handbag derived from a cast of her vagina is
included in a local museum show, makes explicit the metaphor of a woman's
bag as womb
EVA FRIEDEThe Gazette
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Much has been made of fashion's current obsession with the handbag. The
"it'' bag is not just a tote, after all: it also bestows status and has
myriad Freudian connotations. Symbol of the womb, perhaps? A reflection of
the wearer's personality?
But when Montreal artist Lalie Douglas created a beaded handbag modelled on
a silicone cast of her vagina, she was working intuitively, she said.
"You can interpret it different ways,'' said Douglas, who also made two
valise-type bags based on the shape of fish ovaries and embroidered with red
stitches to conjure blood vessels. Inside, giving the bags some heft, are
baby clothes. "There's this idea of carrying around your reproductive
potential."
The vagina bag, about six inches high with a pink silicone interior, is one
of 150 bags on display at a show at the Musée du Costume et du Textile du
Québec in St. Lambert this summer. Titled The Bag Knows Why, the exhibition
features handbags dating from about 1860 to present, lent by museums,
institutions, prominent Quebecers and contemporary creators.
"Bags are so identified with women,'' said museum director Suzanne Chabot.
"Would you agree to open your bag to just anybody?''
Included in the exhibition are bags from Cameroon, Brazil and Polynesia, a
carpet bag from 1858, and bags from drag queen Mado as well as designers
Mariouche Gagné, Diane Jutras and Lucie Bélanger, who works with vinyl
records.
Douglas's bag was part of a show she presented in 2002, called Reproductive
Years, which also included wedding dresses and the fish-ovary bags. One
dress of sheer white organza is embroidered with sperm-like designs and has
a beaded uterus with ovaries hanging inside. "Beading an ovary - you finish
that and you feel like god. You've just built this thing cell by cell,''
Douglas said in the garden of her home, explaining that she learned to sew
as a child but does not find the time to sew lost buttons and other sundry
damage on the clothes of her three children.
Another dress from the 2002 show is vintage, decorated with baby motifs, and
bought at the Salvation Army for her children to play with. It's now rather
disintegrated - "a stand-in for the wear and tear after years of taking care
of the baby,'' she said.
Douglas, 42, admits to a certain ambivalence toward fashion. She does not
carry a purse - has never even owned one - and keeps all she needs in her
pockets or in a knapsack. "The bag as an accessory - I like the idea, but
I'm too practical."
She still wants to look nice, she says, but finds fashion expensive and
somewhat difficult. "You have to study it up like an art."
As a female artist, Douglas said, she finds much to criticize about fashion.
She created a corset of steel and rose thorns on the inside and outside
where boning would be, for instance, as a statement about constricting
styles from the past.
Today, she noted, we have eating disorders in which the constriction has
been internalized.
"You can't just take it off,'' she said of eating disorders like anorexia
and bulimia.
Douglas has moved toward performance art, in which she creates tiny birds of
printed paper feathers. "When I'm finished, it's a little dead bird lying
there.
"It's a metaphor for how an artist works. Once the work is done, it's
dead.''
There's also a contrast at play between delicacy and revulsion, a force also
at play in the vagina bag, she noted.
The Bag Knows Why is showing at the Musée du Costume et du Textile du Québec
until Sept. 14. It's at 349 Riverside St., St. Lambert. Call 450-923-6601 or
go to mctq.org for more information.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(c) The Gazette (Montreal) 2008
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