READING ROOM: In Gestures: A Body of Work, first published this year, editors Alice Butler, Nell Osborne, and Hilary White compile a series of essays which explore embodied, affective, and political gesture in feminist art and writing. In her own contribution to the collection, Butler delves into the ways Woodman uses textiles in her photographs and their relationship to bodies and touch. They are both garments and props, their materiality revealed in the play of light and shadow through sheer fabrics, or the sculptural draping of stiffer, heavier cloth. She writes:

“She suspended second-hand fabric flecked with daisies to create flight—cloud-like, undulating forms that rippled across the image like the passing of time (or a message deferred by the postal network)—and captured her friends wearing cream cotton playsuits, starched stiff and embroidered with knots, pin-tucks, and lace trims: in tactile photographs repeatedly (un)-named as Untitled ... Frozen within the image, her textile objects unfold a homesick haunting: as melancholic portals to the nostalgic pleasures of textiles-past.”

Click here for more information on the publication.

READING ROOM highlights past essays, reviews, and interviews about Betty Woodman, Francesca Woodman, and George Woodman that provide new insights and lenses through which to read and understand their work.