About the Book:

Wild Goose Chase was inspired by a vintage corset belonging to the grandmother of a friend. A farm woman living on the high plains of Colorado, one might wonder why she felt she needed a corset, but it had clearly been in active service for many years.  The same friend shared a book of family recipes: scrumptious desserts, yummy sauces, tasty meat preparations.  These had also stood the tests of time, serving to reinforce kinship and cultural identity and to keep large farm families fed.  What struck me was the juxtaposition of these two artifacts, making specific the complex and layered relationships so many women have with food, bodies and control. 

The book I made in response explores and enacts those tensions.  The five narratives inside the book relate different women’s memories of eating and family, while their recalled familiar foods are printed on delicate pink triangles, laid out in a “wild goose chase” quilt pattern on a fancy lace.  Amidst this femininity and nostalgia, however, is a rigid grip: pages are stitched tightly in multiple lines, steel boning and ball bearings are embedded in the lacework, a long list of “tips” for weight control is inscribed on the backside. When closed, the book is also held tightly together with corset bindings which must be assertively reckoned with before opening the book or viewing its contents.

About the Text:

The text is gleaned from my interviews with five women friends whom I interviewed about their childhood memories of food.  Each talked about favorite childhood foods with great gusto, remembering specific tastes and meals as if they had happened yesterday.  Some women also talked about their mothers’ memories of food, all the more precious for being from times where food was less processed, less fancy, less abundant.   Transforming those memories into shareable narratives for Wild Goose Chase, I often needed a snack!

Yet the other side of food relationships was revealed as well, and I heard about dozens of “strategies” from women to reduce their appetites.  Many tidbits were repeated to me by more than one woman, and I knew most of them, too; they were insidious and pervasive and as I worked with them, I felt unsure of my right to enjoy anything I ate, or to eat anything at all.  It was scary, and it was real.

I am grateful to Charlotte, Jennifer, Alixe, Sally and Tracy sharing their raw and vulnerable and heartfelt (and sometimes funny) stories with me for this book.

About the Materials and Processes: 

Wild Goose Chase is an accordion-style book, with pages constructed in layers.  The paper pages are assembled using both embroidery thread and BufferMount dry mount tissue.  The lace panels and ball bearing-filled glassine triangles are mounted this way as well, and steel corset bones are tucked between the lines of stitches on each page.  The sheer pages (created from a thrift store curtain) are also prepared with BufferMount and sewn into the spines with embroidery thread.  The spines are two layers (muslin and Tyvek); the corset closure panels are muslin with commercial corset busks, grommets and lacing.  The text was digitally typeset (using Cochin and Windsong fonts) and then direct printed or transferred from laser prints to the book pages using a xylene solvent.  With the exception of laser printing and a small amount of machine stitching, all preparation and assembly processes used to create this book were done by hand.

Available for purchase, please inquire.