Making Widowhood Visible

Widow is an interactive textile sculpture that brings visibility to the wounds, pain, and emotional dimensions shared by many widowed individuals.

The work seeks to raise awareness of the profound secondary losses that often follow the death of a spouse and to invite viewers into a space of empathy, reflection, and deeper understanding.

Widowhood is an often-invisible state in today’s society.

These garments—heavy black dresses, crepe veils, and unadorned hats—served as visible markers of grief. Yet they also rendered widows socially invisible, symbolizing spiritual seclusion, silence, and withdrawal from community life.

The conceptual foundation of the installation draws from the historical representation of widowed women, particularly the iconic black mourning dresses of the Victorian era. Following the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s extended, codified mourning practices established widow’s weeds as a dominant cultural symbol.

The Weight
of Widow’s Weeds

This work reflects the collapse of familiar structures and the reshaping of identity that follows loss.

In this installation, Widow, I aim to reinterpret this ”Architectures of Grief” through a twisted, fragmented, and deconstructed cage-skirt.

Architectures of Grief

In the historical context of mourning attire, crinolines—cage-like structures worn beneath dresses—played a vital role in garment design, shaping the silhouettes of Victorian widow’s weeds.

These rigid, symmetrical, and concealed forms serve as a metaphor for the emotional and social constraints imposed on widowed women after losing their partners. Such expectations often leave them feeling trapped by societal norms that stigmatize their roles and limit their participation in their communities.

Although I do not wear these black Victorian garments or the cage-skirt structures, I often feel similarly constrained, as if I am trapped beneath a cage-skirt structure. The heaviness of those black fabrics symbolizes the burden and stigma I carry as a widow; I feel restrained and unable to take an active place in society.

It serves as my metaphorical

rebellion against the

stigmatization of

widowed women.

Material exploration played a crucial role in the development of the piece.

Drawing from decades of experience as a textile designer with an architectural background, I selected materials that could express the tensions, ruptures, and textures of widowhood.

Black textiles were torn, scraped, cut, and reassembled to mirror emotional fracture.

The custom wooden framework serves as the loom in which Widow is interwoven, symbolizing the constrained social frame within which widowed women are often set apart.

The sculpture also integrates, wool, tulle, thresd, cables, embroidery, conductive fibers, and a wooden frame structure.

Because tactility is central to textile practice, interactive technology—specifically capacitive touch sensors and an Arduino board—was incorporated at the heart of the structure.

Arduino and Touch sensor Test

Conductive thread and neopixels testing

soldering the electronic componets

8-channel capacitive sensor board testing

Materials as Emotional Interaction

The Losses No One Sees

Central to the sculpture is the acknowledgment of secondary losses—an aspect of widowhood often overlooked. The death of a spouse is only the beginning. Many widowed women face the loss of belonging, financial stability, social status, partnership, identity, confidence, intimacy, health, professional continuity, or dreams for the future.

In Widow, these secondary losses are represented on black tulle strips, embroidered with words that symbolize these losses, with conductive thread stitched over them in raised, tactile patterns.

Embroidering - loss of Faith

Sewing the stripes of loss

This design reflects on the psychological fractures that emerge from the unraveling of the social and cultural fabric that once supported the women's lives.

The tulle strips are interwoven horizontally through the cage skirt and wooden frame, holding everything together.

Touching the Cracks

This interactivity transforms the viewer into a participant, guiding their emotional journey and making grief both visible and tangible.

Each embroidered word functions as a sensor. When viewers touch these textured strips, the sculpture responds: lights dim, darkness grows, and audio emerges.

Witnessing Grief, Understanding Resilience

Through the interplay of historical reference, material transformation, sensory interaction, and emotional resonance, Widow creates a space for witnessing and understanding the multidimensional experience of widowhood.

Rather than hiding grief behind symbolic garments, the installation opens it outward, inviting the public to explore the complexities of loss and the resilience that arises afterward.