In the same context with the ‘Lisa Paper Dress‘ by Robert Wilson, the Greek artist Irini Miga(b. 1981) was asked to convert one dress from the Mars Manufacturing Company ‘Paint-your-own-dress’ series. Miga transformed the dress into a very sensitive exhibit, which she used as an autobiographical canvas, where she also addressed issues of sexuality and identity

”As all of my early works, this work is quite autobiographical. I took elements from the agricultural region of Thessaly where I grew up…. I wanted to depict the fertile ground as a woman that endlessly brings life on earth. This dress is a dreamy abstraction of a woman’s body as mother earth… As hair from her braid on the back of the dress is falling on the ground, the seeds are placed. An agricultural scene on the front of the dress depicts farmers working on the ground, harvesting its goods… I used colored pencils on this dress to depict this scene of the circle of life. Colored pencils were my first art tool, one that connected my early years of childhood with my first adult thoughts as an artist.”

Excerpt from a written interview to M. Pichou on the occasion of the article
“The ATOPOS RIPPING Project: a “new” life for dress objects ?” (COSTUME, volume 54, issue 2, 2020)

CLICK HERE for Irini Miga’s Presentation to the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation & Hellenic Costume Society Present In Conversation 4 / ‘Creating new objects for display: the ATOPOS RIPPING Project’ moderated by Myrsini Pichou - 11.12.2020