DORSET ART WEEKS 2021 (21 MAY - 6 JUNE)

35 DORSET ART WEEKS 2021 SOPHIE MOLINS ‘MEGHADŪTA’ There are certain threads that run through the work of filmmaker SOPHIE MOLINS. She is a collector, gathering objects over many years, from sugar packets to her own hair with the idea of making it into an artwork. It is the technical issues involved in making the work, which slows the process down. She is interested in rituals in the ways we have of dealing with life events. Weddings are a ritual that is full of symbolism. Following Queen Victoria’s wedding the tradition of wearing a white wedding dress became established, almost entering mythology, coming to represent purity and virginity. However in reality part of its function was to highlight the wealth of the bride’s family. Just as patrons commissioned 15th century altarpieces using lapis lazuli for the virgin’s gown because such an expensive pigment emphasised their wealth. With the white wedding - often the end the bride is looking forward to, rather than the beginning of the future - the white dress worn once and left forgotten in the back of a wardrobe represented the power of money to buy and discard. Sophie Molins invented her own ritual - her own way of discarding her wedding dress post-divorce. She traveled to Venice and threw it into the canal in that most romantic of cities. She generated ritual-envy in another recently divorced friend and rashly promised to send her friend’s discarded wedding dress into space. And she did. The technical challenges of propelling this beautiful garment with its long embroidered sleeves and row of tiny buttons were immense. But she found a company who could actually do it and so it went into space and came back so she could remove the cameras from it and work on the images. A problem, which she had not envisioned, was that many people think that the film was CGIed and so she has increasingly shown the mechanics of the whole process with glimpses of the structure. Molins is fascinated by mesmerism and spiritualism. She studied anthropology as well as art and during lockdown she has been immersing herself in exploring the isolation engendered by our frequent enforced periods of isolation. A couple of years ago she completed a residency in Finland where deliberately isolating oneself was part of the process. She had no idea that this would be something imposed by a world-wide pandemic at a later date. In the last year she has been making little monsters which she is unsure of yet, but it is a way of working through what is happening in the world which is essentially the function of most rituals. Her work is steeped in historical references, many of them tracing the depiction of women in painting. She examines how women are denigrated and relegated, perceived merely as homemaker and mother. But she also uses images that emphasise the power of women like Salome with the head of John the Baptist. She is interested in the way that the séance allowed Victorian women to become something else, to escape the confines of the roles assigned to them and to do outrageous things. The words - thread, woven, stitched - seem very relevant to what Molins does. Her work has included making dresses out of unexpected materials. She is planning to make a dress with corsets, another huge technical challenge, using her collection of those small white sugar packets that accompany coffee in a café. These little objects contain a plethora of references from weight gain to diet to restrictive clothing, to pleasure and self-denial. And sugar itself comes with so much baggage, much of which has been highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement: sugar plantations, slavery, colonialism and exploitation. The work that Sophie Molins makes is both political and feminist but its beauty seduces, and consequently the concepts behind it are doubly powerful. Fiona Robinson VENUE 222 Lewesden Hill, Stoke Knapp Cottage, STOKE ABBOTT, Beaminster, Dorset DT8 3JZ. 01308 867132 / 07957 462901. weddingdressinspace.com 4 COLOURS to make a THOUSAND SHADES #COLOURINGYOURFUTURE WWW.STEPHENSANDGEORGE.CO.UK 01685 388888 l SALES STEPHENSANDGEORGE.CO.UK GOAT MILL ROAD l DOWLAIS l MERTHYR TYDFIL l CF48 3TD FOLLOW US ON TWITTER SandGPrintGroup