The Town With One Side is an in-progress project that I began during a 2021 residency at the Studios at Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA. While conducting local and family research, I learned that my great-great-grandfather had been a textile worker at Arnold Print Works, the factory that now houses the museum, as well as at Cranston Print Works in Rhode Island. Beginning in 1892, Arnold Print Works produced some of the earliest stuffed toys: most famously, lithographic prints on fabric of cats and rabbits that were meant to be cut out and sewn into three-sided plush dolls.
Self Portrait (Dear Michael and Margaret), is the first piece in a series exploring the processes and technologies that facilitate the flattening of complex forms and concepts, and those which allow for the application or transformation––through printing, wrapping, and projection––of imagery into/onto 3D objects. The concept of sidedness—in stories, in geometry and topology, in art history’s interest in dimensional categorization of form—runs through the project at every level.
Read more about this project in PLUME Issue 4 (pages 6-9)
Self Portrait (Dear Michael and Margaret) Screen print on cloth, polyfil, thread, 15”x7”x4.” Open edition (14), 2023
Self Portrait (Dear Michael and Margaret) Screen print on cloth, polyfil, thread, 15”x7”x4.” Open edition (14), 2023
The Margie Etchings is a portrait series depicting my late great great grandmother Margaret, who was an Irish immigrant living in Cranston Rhode Island and North Adams, MA with her husband Michael, who worked in the textile mills.
© Sally Clegg 2024