Untitled (Exhausted), 2021
Silk organza, 250 prenatal vitamins, cotton cording, onion skins, hibiscus tea, coffee. 65 × 32 × 3 inches.
In natural dyeing, iron is used to "sadden" color, to deepen and darken it at the molecular level. The standard material is ferrous sulfate, a powder from a textile supply catalog.
For this piece, I replaced it with prenatal vitamins.
Each pill contains 27mg of ferrous fumarate. That small amount, released into a warm dye bath, is enough to pull silk from blush to deep brown. 250 vitamins, each wrapped in organza and tied with cotton cording, immersed in a dye bath tied to my own postpartum experience. The lower portion marks a contentious relationship with caffeine, the thing that got me through the day and left me further depleted.
The iron that saddens the color is the same iron a postpartum body cannot hold onto.