Stacy Lynne Motte

A Highboy, An Explanation:

My current process begins with a search for the kinds of stories that exist in the historical record and are known by scholars, but that don’t often make it into the mainstream conversation surrounding historical furniture or historical craft. These stories then guide my decision-making process.

I wanted to make a highboy for a number of reasons. First, originals exist in major museums and collections all over the world and they are celebrated as examples of expertise in woodworking, beautiful design, regional variation in woodworking techniques, evidence of masterful luxury material use, etc. Very rarely does the display information situate these pieces of furniture in the larger historical narrative of imperialism, land speculation, slavery, etc. The really elaborate highboys in particular would have been extremely expensive and therefore status symbols and that status would most likely have been gained through what we would consider very nefarious means. And then there are the materials and material supply chains to consider. The most expensive of these cabinets were made predominantly of mahogany, which was harvested by slaves in the Caribbean and Central America in what was known even then to be truly horrific conditions. Mahogany itself was a status symbol. Most of the other materials used in the making of this furniture have similarly dark histories.

These cabinets were famous for their height- usually more than 7ft., and were always described in masculine terms- possessing a stately presence, strong curves, bold lines, etc. So, I wanted my highboy to be kind of a mockery of the mythos surrounding original highboys. Robbing this cabinet of its famous height and bringing it low in this very phallic and sexually suggestive way is intentional. Additionally, the bent back has made the rest of the cabinet more or less useless, so I have robbed it of its purpose too. There are, of course, other ways to interpret this posture. Maybe those who don’t see sex here will see the bent back of a manual laborer.

My dream for this piece is that it someday sits in the presence of original Highboys. I think it would then become impossible not to have a more complicated conversation about the provenance of this furniture.

Spread is a collaborative project between Stacy Motte and Eleanor Ingrid Rose. In preparation for this work, we mined historical craft for instances in which women were vital but anonymous participants and then incorporated the iconic products of this labor into traditional furniture forms. We were particularly interested in craft companies with lengthy histories who were known as taste-makers within their fields. We landed on the Wedgwood Ceramics Company which was founded in 1759 and employed women for manual labor from its inception, but excluded them from design decisions until 1900. These products were, of course, marketed to women.

The individual pieces in this collection are in a state of flux, both consumed by and consuming the domestic object with which they are engaged.

This work explores femininity as a socially and culturally constructed concept with constraints on behavior that are alternately suffocating and comforting. By building a domestic space and filling it with delicate, quaint, and seemingly innocuous objects that misbehave; objects that are simultaneously luxurious and vile, I hope to challenge and complicate our associations with femininity.

This was my MFA exhibition. It was scheduled to open two days after COVID lockdown began in Wisconsin. In addition to these pieces, there was a vanity with Petri dish drawers that I intended visitors to infect. During the COVID epidemic it suddenly became very unfunny to be making actual biohazards, so this installation was never completed or photographed and the work was never shown.

I build sculptural pieces in order to explore the social and cultural implications of “objectivity” in the production of knowledge.  I am examining the Western archive as narrative, a grandiose fiction substantiated by visual information (or its lack) and mediated by language.  The archive is an information infrastructure predicated on objectivity through observation, a great bank of evidence accumulated, ordered and defined since the mid-19th century.  It is culturally couched in Enlightenment social theory in which civilization and progress are synonymous.  Civilization, it was believed, is marked by agency, the agency of great men, which situated the illiterate (and likely leaderless) primitive world as the benchmark upon which progress is measured.    Although the social idealism of the 19th century proved untenable in the aftermath of WWI and II, the hierarchical system through which we filter and accommodate new information, a methodology that mediates all that is knowable, remains subtly but firmly entrenched. 

For Westerners the archive is the physical location of our recorded history.  Although we treat it as evidence, the archive is a great deal more nuanced, contradictory and incomplete than any work of fiction.  It is marked by the folly of the human hands that gathered and ordered it, and the vast quantity of information misconstrued or lost.   My objects are situated within this empty space in the archive, not in order to fill it, but to imagine the implications of an irredeemable past. 

Furniture, more or less.