Lesley Dill

Lecture: Monday, May 23

Lesley Dill's images and constructions explore the nature of the body and its clothing. At once a painter, printmaker, sculptor, photographer and performance artist, Dill seems impossible to categorize. Her images and constructions explore the elusive boundaries between mind, body and spirit. In particular, her work uses metaphorical imagery to investigate the roles of language and clothing in cloaking or revealing the human soul. In her early career, Dill often fashioned sculpture in the form of dresses and suits but had never combined the forms with letters or words. After reading the works of early American poet Emily Dickinson, Dill began to think of clothing as an emotional boundary between the body and the universe. She also began to consider garments as housing for the body, which in turn is housing for the soul. In the 1990s, Dill’s dresses and suits began to be shaped by words—words as a second skin and as the remnants of our physical existence.