Maggie Jaszczak

I was drawn in particular to maybe the darkest paragraph in Yoder’s story:

The double skirt swept up with it dead leaves and grass clippings, glinting shards of glass and lost earrings. Sometimes even small animals such as lice, flies, frogs, or grasshoppers were taken into the double skirts, and at night, when the women pulled the skirts from their faces, the plagues were invoked in their bedrooms. . . . The walls moved with flies. Lice hid in their hair. Some had caught up the carcasses of birds and left streaks of brown blood in their sheets.

In my own work I make objects of utility, the tools, vessels and veils that exist at the limits of our vulnerability in order to extend us into the world. I rarely touch directly upon the body in my work, but I am interested in how, in the absence of the body, the total familiarity of such objects with our ontological failings allows them, collectively, to present it perhaps most clearly. Like the skirts of Yoder’s story, the very act of clothing the body precisely outlines it, in both its utter darkness and its holiness.