Patricia Miranda

Lives and works in New York City, NY, USA

Artist statement

My work is a manifesto of defiant softness. I create site-responsive sculptures and installations using vintage lace and textiles repurposed from women around the world. They are built into oversize hoop skirts, sewn into shroud-like tapestries, and hand-dyed with natural colors such as cochineal. Tiny stitches of lace aggregate into monumental documents marking hidden economies of craft, care, resilience, and resistance, women’s labor that functions on the edges of commodity. The sculptures act as erotic metaphors shaped by the architecture of a modified body, identity-forming architectures of a body that refuses to comply. Slits and openings allow a view into the interior without the possibility of entry; inside hangs ghostly clothing, or hand-dyed bibles in lace girdle books. I layer the works with vintage books and objects of lamentation, ex-votos, reliquaries, and other bodily forms; the ties of aprons anthropomorphize into arms in search of a body to wrap around. Tenderness and strength are equal in a beautiful almost monstrous femininity. This feels especially urgent in this moment, when the autonomy of women’s and all non-conforming bodies are under the peril of legal and social control by governmental and religious institutions and individuals. Textiles are my sole comfort, a feminist resistance for the end of empire. Textile covers every body from birth to death, it holds and transmits visceral histories in its fibers. It is a language that forms cultural and...

Artwork