Lost Girls remembered in art

IT is not macabre but rather a memorial, the artist behind an exhibition of outfits inspired by missing or dead women tells The Clare Champion. The Lost Girls, by Áine Phillips, is being displayed in Ennis as part of the Rianta exhibition by the Ground Up Artists Collective (GUAC).
The seeds for the project were set when Áine began to imagine losing someone herself. “I began work on the project in 2009. I started developing the idea because my oldest daughter went to college in Dublin and the feeling that your child is gone and is she ok and you can’t keep an eye on her the way you once did when she lived with you. I thought about families of lost girls or women who disappeared in Ireland and around the world and I thought about what that would be like if your own girl, your daughter, your sister, your wife, your mother went missing, so I decided to do a project about lost girls,” she explains.
“There is so much information on the internet now about people who go missing because as soon as they are lost, people put up websites on these girls trying to find them. I looked at these and made costumes representing some of them and dedicated each of the outfits to a woman,” she outlines.
Of course, the world has an abundance of missing women. “I wanted to get a representative mix of different types of girls and I also wanted to do a piece on the Magdalene Laundries because it is something that I have really thought about. It is such an important piece of Irish history and it is really important that Irish women especially remember all the girls who disappeared into the Magdalene Laundries. That is why I did a piece on that. As well as looking at the Irish experience, I also wanted to get stories from around the world, some women who are missing and some who were found dead,” Áine reveals.
For the artist, the costumes are a way of representing these women’s lives and, for some, of marking their passing. They are modern-day memorials but created in a medium that challenges the audience by its transience.
“In a way, each costume is a memorial but usually, we have a memorial in stone or bronze in some kind of permanent material. When making a memorial to women, using clothing is so important because women express their identities through clothes. For women, we don’t have so much power in the world, so our appearance is our power and it is what we project out into the world,” the North Clare artist asserts.
Starting out, the project threw up some ethical questions. With the internet pouring information into homes and businesses around the world, Áine felt it is vital to consider the living families of the women she is representing.
“When you are dealing with real people, you have to be sensitive and make things that are beautiful and elegant and would show the women off in their best light. I wanted this to be an ethical project so I had to consider the families or friends or relatives of these missing or dead girls and how they would feel if they came across this work. I thought from the beginning that I should make the pieces really beautiful because they are like a portrait. So each outfit should look really good when you wear it. I considered if it is ethical to make representations of people who are lost or dead but artists have always done portraits of people not necessarily with their permission, so it is ok to do portraits of people as long as I do it in such a way that it represents the person in the best light,” she says.
The materials the established sculptor uses differ from her usual more solid forms.
“I considered the story of each girl and I made the materials reflect these stories. One costume is dedicated to Maria Madden, a Magdalene in Ireland. She talked about being under lock and key, so I used keys in the costume. There is Paloma Angélica Escobar Ledezma, whose costume is in the window of Mademoiselle. She was a computer student and her body was found in Juarez, Mexico. Someone had dressed her but the clothes were put on upside down. To represent her, I used keys from computers to make a necklace and a belt for her. I made a jacket to be worn upside down but it still looks beautiful and looks elegant. I used the references I took from each of the girls’ stories, sometimes in a literal way, sometimes in a more symbolic way in the pieces, like a sculptor would,” Áine comments.
“Another woman, Mercedes, disappeared near sulphur mines in Mexico. So I sent for sulphur crystals from Mexico and incorporated them into car mirrors that are worn like brooches on the dress. I used the broken mirrors to represent something that was complete and then destroyed, a symbolic destruction of something that was beautiful. I responded to the story from my own heart and considered how best to represent it through materials,” Áine continues.
“I made another dress out of ties. That is dedicated to a girl who went missing in Bosnia during the terrible wars there in the 1990s. I read the stories of the rape camps that women were forced to endure. By using ties, I was taking an emblem of masculinity and transforming it into something feminine. I changed it from something representing masculine power into something to be worn to express female power and beauty. It looks really beautiful and elegant,” she observes.
For Áine, head of sculpture at the Burren College of Art, exhibiting in a boutique is particularly appropriate for this project.
“I thought the costumes would be perfect in the window of a boutique and Ennis is so famous for its boutiques. Because the project is about women and what women wear and garments as a form of portrait, I thought a boutique would be more appropriate than a gallery. They would be good in a gallery too but this means they are available for everyone to see on the street in Ennis,” Áine concluded.
More information on Áine’s work is available on www.ainephillips.com. For additional information on the Ground Up Artists, log on to www.groundupartists.com.