Habitual

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I have chosen a recreation of the nun habit veil in order to express body as witness. The veil is a witness to morality, culture, and religion and how it affects the way we dress. Hair is seen as a sensual aspect of the female body, so nuns are expected to cover their hair in order to keep from distracting men. The biblical origin of this belief is in Corinthians 11. It is typical of the Catholic church to perceive women as temptresses who are a source of men committing evil. As someone who attended a Catholic high school, I battled with my superiors in the school system about these ideals frequently, and in effect, it still remains a point of reference for a lot of my work. I wanted to use the body as witness in order rebel against this concept. I did this by creating three nun’s veils out of black, tan, and white leather. I wanted to do a group of three because threes are extremely significant in Catholicism: the Holy Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and especially here, the three vows a nun takes: poverty, chastity, and obedience. I then cut into the veils in order to reveal hair, the origin of potential male sin. As the vows become more extreme, so does the rebellion of showing hair which starts from a braid, transitions to a woven peak in the second veil, finally to reveal long glossy hair flowing from the final white veil. I then photographed these pieces and put them together in a book in order to best see the transition and how the pieces looked on the human figure.

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