Article Database - Wedding Dress Exhibit Wins Awards for Red Deer Museum

Fabrications: Stitching Ourselves Together, an exhibit featuring 23 wedding dresses sewn by a Lacombe woman, has won two national awards for the Red deer and District Museum and a national tour starting with the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Fabrications started when sociologist Dr. Kathryn Church was visiting her family in Lacombe. She noticed her mother, Lorraine Church, preparing to throw away the scribblers she used to document the wedding dresses she had made for friends, family and neighbors over a 45-year period.

Kathryn, who says she had rejected for herself the life of service to home and family her mother represented, realized there was history in those scribblers.

"Sitting down with mom to take her sewing scribblers seriously was an important moment in our relationship," she says in the narrative accompanying the exhibit. "It broke my long-standing disinterest in the people and events that captured her attention. Listening to her narrate the pages, I heard a social history not just of her own labor and creativity but of a form of women's work and relationship in a small prairie community."

Kathryn's first idea was to exhibit her mother's work in a small venue such as a church basement. She posted the idea on an Internet museum list and eventually connection with Wendy Martindale, executive director of the Red Deer & District Museum.

"The idea certainly intrigued us, "Martindale says. "The primary story is not the wedding dresses, but the relationship of mother and daughter and the evolution of the relationship as they viewed and communicated with each other over the course of the project. We knew it would have a really powerful appeal to a lot of people."

Kathryn hunted down the dresses and interviewed their owners. Their stories are included in the exhibit. " I wanted to communicate that with the dresses the women were actually constructing the story of their lives and of their lives as women," Kathryn told CBC radio, which produced a documentary on the project. "The exhibit is also about women in many layers at many levels putting themselves together." The exhibit is connected by Kathryn's narrative about her relationship with her mother and how it evolved during the project.

Fabrications premiered at the Red Deer & District Museum in the summer of 1998. It opened at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec, in Glenbow Museum in Calgary from February 6 to August 29, 2000. Future stops include the Museum of Industry in Stellarton, Nova Scotia, the Museum and the Thunder Bay Art Gallery.

The exhibit received Awards of Excellence recently from interpretation Canada in the interior Exhibit category and for its Web site.

The Web site was designed by Louise Mcleod, a former Canadian now living in Pennsylvania who was so intrigued by the exhibit's story that she volunteered her services.