All my Mothers’ Mothers

dress, dance, and video project

April 29, 2021

All my Mothers’ Mothers activates matrilineal geneology as a visceral counter-monument. The projectoriginates with a single bias-cut slip dress pattern produced across cotton, linen, and silk, with each garment screen-printed with the name and lifespan of a direct female ancestor.

Created to confront the historical erasure and systemic containment of women’s lives, the garments operate as somatic vessels. By wearing each dress and activating it thorugh movement and video performance, generational inheritance ceases to be an abstract archival record and becomes an embodied presence.

Staged across three distinct environments-domestic interiors, Rock Creek Park, and the monumental core of Washington, DC- the performances place the vulnerable female form in direct friction with civic space. Moving in a slip dress beneath the National Monument and circling General Sheridan on horseback, the work interrogates how patriarchal power, state violence, and national memory are cast into bronze and granite, contrasting them with the fragile, enduring lineage of the bodies that survived them.