Pounce. Edge Gallery 1/24-2/9 2025 modern embroidery and textile art.
- Heather Hauptman
- Jan 11, 2025
- 1 min read
Transforming second hand dresses into art with modern embroidery of the political moment.
I started making in July, 2024. It was soon after JD Vance famously blamed the country's woes on childless women with cats. A timeless cliché, and slander. Witches, incomplete women, useless dregs on society. I began by drawing figures (some inspired by male bodies, some female) on to my secondhand dresses. The dresses I found are conservative, a version of an ideal femine. The figures I embroidered on to them, some androgenous some more definably femine, are whatever they want to be. Free from the ideal of the femine.
The cat is smoke, sitting female figure. Close up of figure with a hat and cat on their shoulders. Hoodie wearing figure and their two cats. Hoodie wearing figure with a cat on their shoulders.
She sat quietly minding her own business.
Frowns pile up around her, sticking to each other as they become caught in a net of negative notions.
Smiles slip through, sinuous and silky. She notices with little expression.
Maybe she is planning, watching, waiting to pounce.
Or simply to slink off into the shadows…where she belongs, they’d say.



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