CRYING HATS

This variable sized installation consists of a structure of copper pipes supporting a series of men's fedora hats dripping wine from their brims. A trough on the floor below catches the liquid and serves as a reservoir with a concealed pump that circulates the wine throughout the piping system.

As a way of reflecting on how we tailor nature to mirror our own images, I have used clothing to create landscapes. Recently, I have been interested in exploring the terrain in which nature and culture are without clear boundaries. By pairing a natural substance--wine, with items of clothing--hats, Crying Hats seeks to reconcile our "internal" bodily experience with what we commonly view as an "external" experience of nature. Here, the hats are surrogates for the human form. The dripping wine mimics the sound and patterns of gentle rain. In this context, wine is also blood, sustenance, tears; the hats, patriarchy, the business world, history. Secondary meanings arise, subverting the primary, as the hats, though signifiers of culture, are also dripping organic forms and the wine, although natural, is alternatively a man-made product replete with cultural and historic meanings. It is the shifting and uneasy relationship between nature and culture that this project seeks to elucidate.

Crying Hats, 1999; Metal, copper, water, pump, men's hats; Size variable- from 8' wide and high on up. Projects from wall 18".