Gail Grinnell’s “Bitter Love”

“The soul descends once more in bitter love/ To accept the waking body.”
—from “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” by Richard Wilbur (1959)

In “Bitter Love,” Gail Grinnell continues a decade-old process in which a multi-layered, translucent surface is fabricated from materials and images which draw on a language of memory and the body. Dressmaking patterns—salvaged from boxes saved by her aging mother—are layered with silk and polyester interfacing; overlaid line drawings in white and black ink describe the intricate ruffles and rouches of a child’s painstakingly constructed party dress. Grinnell references a world of intergenerational caretaking; of clothes as a container and substitute for the body: a second skin. Images of nerve and bone are interspersed among the instructional notations for seam and dart; twining thread furls into spirochete and worm—intestinal and microscopic.

Grinnell’s process mimics the quotidian pattern of laundry and dressmaking, the daily tending of dependent bodies, the sensuous care of of the infant and child, and the bitter love for the aged and dying body. In “Bitter Love,” she has freed her pieces from the confines of the square. Cut into patterns of lace and integument, her surfaces form a skin both tough and fragile, durable and depleted. Her figures morph and swell, pulling against gravity like half-filled balloons, billowing like laundry on the line, boneless and buoyant as jellyfish.

The shaped pieces function as more than portraits. Personages, they document their own mortality as they seek to rise above it: a wedding shroud hanging like a veiled portal; a translucent sea bloom hovering as pinkly tenuous as a baby’s breath. The newly born or newly dead, the sick, the old, the very young, they tug at their physical tethers, hovering between heaven and earth like captured angels.

—Elizabeth Bryant