Dress ups: Winsome Jobling
In Dress Ups, Winsome Jobling has made a series of twelve archetypical dresses that interrogate the differences between fabric and paper and subvert the presentation of the feminine. These are modeled on real and very special dresses she has collected and they recall the dresses we all remember; our own dress ups, that were always too big and to wonderful to wear out, the ones that now reside in the collective female memory wardrobe.
Jobling's paper dresses are made from bleached banana fibre –"because of its inherent strength, its translucence and its appearance of fragility". The dresses are big, almost twice life size and their making has been a feat of technical virtuosity. The individual sheets used in the dresses are up to two metres by one metre, which required Jobling to develop suitable simple technology: "I have tried using the back of a ute as a vat ... and draining the vat as opposed to lifting the heavy mould (to do so takes six people)."
The dresses are ambiguous and contradictory – the paper seems so fragile and ephemeral, like the tissue paper dress patterns that covered the floor and windows of the gallery, but it is stronger than it looks. Cut out Paper Doll Dresses are slight and flimsy but Jobling's dresses are monumental; fit for giant dolls who could only be dressed by Amazonian hands. They are flat and two dimensional – to be looked at from the front – and they have fold back tabs on the shoulders and the sides.
Unlike the originals, they are also meant to be looked through and seen with light behind: they are hung to cast shadows. They dwarf the