Guinevere’s Tears (Detail)

 

Traveling Shrines — Guinevere’s Tears

Susan Hazard

Guinevere’s Tears   2007

Recycled wedding dress, netting, wood, nails, recycled table support, rope, chain, china cup, used metal box, gold paper, soil, vintage glass bottle, gold wedding ring, personal 1979 journal pages, photocopies, metal straight pins.

 

Guinevere’s Tears (Detail)

 

Guinevere’s Tears (Detail)

 

Guinevere’s Tears

 

A wedding gown embodies many dreams. Dreams and expectations of love, security, and fulfillment of an anticipated future filled with a husband, children, and a home fill the heart and mind of the woman wearing a wedding gown. This lovely dress was meant to be worn to create a vision of wondrous beauty for a cherished ceremony, captured in photographs to be remembered for decades. Perhaps the dress would be preserved to be passed to a daughter for her wedding. It was hand sewn from heavy satin, decorated with lace and hand beaded, with no detail overlooked: even a tiny loop in the train to lift the hem for easier dancing after the ceremony. No step in the design, structure or sewing of this magnificent dress had been overlooked. The label in the dress was sewn in by a seamstress on the East Coast. It would have cost the bride close to a month’s professional wages to pay for it; I purchased the dress in a Goodwill store for $25.00.

 

The wedding dress, the most beautiful and detailed of all the second-hand gowns on the rack of the Goodwill store, is now the centerpiece of the traveling shrine for unfulfilled romantic expectations. The wedding ceremony is often viewed as the apex of a woman’s life, but who ever details what “lived happily ever after”? What seems to matter is the lifetime effort leading up to the much anticipated wedding day. This shrine, built around a discarded wedding gown, exemplifies the “ever after” for many women in their marriages.

· The metal box – the hope chest.

· The water, from the Chalice Well, Glastonbury, Somerset, England which is adjacent to the Glastonbury Cathedral where Guinevere and King Arthur were originally buried, is for the subconscious or the source of all life.

· The glass bottle is the vessel, as a woman is symbolically envisioned.

· The wedding ring is symbolic of marriage.

· The soil is representative of buried feelings and thwarted dreams.

· The cup is to partake or share in Guinevere’s tears.

· The nails and the pins are multiple in meaning: the pain of reality, being a prickly personality or being hammered to the wall or the cross.

· The rope and pull are to lead the shrine to its next destination.

· The wheels are for conveyance; unfortunately, they are positioned to turn the shrine in circles, hence the futility of “moving forward.”

· The image of my mother and me as a baby acknowledges the past expectations I tried to fulfill in my life.

· The journal pages with thoughts and drawings from a journal (1971-1975) representing my struggle to maintain my dream to be an artist despite my ambivalence with relationships and how they could impact my work.

· The image of the Knight in Shining Armor speaks for itself.

Guinevere’s Tears (Detail)