Study for Falling Girl
"Falling Girl" is the maquette or study for a much larger version exhibited in "A Mouthful of Words," the 1997 AMUM exhibition of works by Lesley Dill, an artist who derives her inspiration from lyric poetry and her technique from traditional women’s crafts and hand work. The stamped quote is from a poem by Austrian writer, Rainer Maria Rilke. The exhibit title also describes a body of work Dill created with students over the course of several visits to the U of M campus. She arrived for the first session with rough sketches and descriptions for eight pieces.
The planning note for this piece reads:
Falling Girl in Black Dress---white highlights
with arms moving & maybe dress
Actually she would be photographed
upright, on her tiptoes (with
support for heels) with her
hair pinned to the backdrop or moussed or whatever. Dress
could be pulled by monofilament
Words on hands + feet
Except for the last line, it’s exactly what happened. The student endured several hours of preparation, including 30 minutes of having her goopy, wired locks stapled to the backdrop while teetering on her toes. The actual photograph required a half hour under hot lights while off stage two students pulled her skirt back and forth. Finally, students carefully detached her hair. The eight photos taken that night, each with its own model, costume, and set up were printed by students on small pieces of photo-linen. Dill took the prints home to New York, applied additional media and returned them to Memphis to guide the creation of the 3’x4’ exhibit pieces. AMUM’s main gallery transformed into a studio for a week where shifts of students, under Dill’s supervision, sanded, scraped, stitched, stamped and drew on the printed images. While AMUM hummed with that work, students also designed and fabricated a small catalog illustrated with the studies and Dill’s thumbnail sketches with her notes like the one quoted. The handmade catalog won First Place in the Southeast Museums Conference publication awards for 1997 over dozens of glossy books.
-Leslie Luebbers, Museum Director