Multidisciplinary Designer
Spatial Design | Textile Art | Immersive Storytelling
Making Widowhood Visible
Widowhood is an often-invisible state in today’s society. 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.
Charles Dana Gibson Illustration, A widow and her friends. New York: R. H. Russell; London: J. Lane, 1901. (seq.15) She Finds That Exercise Does Not Improve Her Spirits
The Weight of Widow’s Weeds
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.
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.
Architectures of Grief
This historical imagery is central to the conceptual development of Widow. Particular attention was given to the cage-like understructures that shaped Victorian mourning silhouettes. Rigid, symmetrical, and concealed, these forms act as metaphors for the emotional and social constraints many widowed individuals face.
The installation reimagines this architecture through a twisted, fragmented, and deconstructed cage skirt, reflecting the collapse of familiar structures and the reshaping of identity that follows loss.
Textiles as Emotional Interaction
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. The sculpture integrates black fabric, thread, wool, tulle, cables, embroidery, conductive fibers, and a wooden framework.
Black textiles were torn, scraped, cut, and reassembled to mirror emotional fracture. Because tactility is central to textile practice, interactive technology—specifically capacitive sensors and an Arduino board—was incorporated at the heart of the structure.
Black tulle strips are interwoven horizontally through the cage skirt and wooden frame, holding everything together while symbolizing the constrained social frame within which widowed individuals are often set apart.
The Losses No One Sees
Central to the work 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 losses in:
"Covered in mourning"
These experiences reflect a deeper unraveling of the social and cultural fabric that once supported their lives. Each tulle strip is embroidered with words representing these secondary losses.
Touching the Cracks
In Widow, these secondary losses appear on the horizontal tulle strips. Each stripe is embroidered with a word, and conductive thread is stitched over it in raised, tactile patterns that resemble psychological fissures.
Each embroidered word functions as a sensor. When viewers touch these textured strips, the sculpture responds: lights dim, darkness grows, and audio emerges. This interactivity turns the viewer into a participant—guiding the emotional journey and making grief both visible and felt.
Witnessing Grief, Understanding Resilience
Through the interplay of historical reference, material transformation, sensory interaction, and emotional resonance, Widow creates a space where the multidimensional experience of widowhood can be witnessed and understood.
Rather than concealing grief behind symbolic garments, the installation opens it outward—inviting the public to consider the complexity of loss and the resilience that follows.