“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth,
for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire:
it is the time for home.”
Edith Sitwell
wishing you and peaceful and calm month of december.
peace, virginia
virginia fitzgerald: art, inspiration, ink; the passions of the creator of the 'dressproject'
Wednesday, December 1, 2021
Wednesday, November 17, 2021
my #dressproject 2005-present ...
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| 'lilith's room ...' manhattanville |
Today I had the honor of speaking to the students at Manhattanville College about 'lilith's room ...' and my #dressproject. Here is the slideshow that I created for the talk. A little visual review of how I am #vadressobsessed ~
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| 'this is me ... a work in progress' and 'flirt ...' manhattanville college |
Friday, November 5, 2021
the Attleboro Arts Museum auction ends today!!
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| link to bid on 'don't slip ...' |
‘don’t slip …’ is now available in the @attleboroartsmuseum’s annual auction - follow the link to see all the glorious art & support this awesome museum!
link to bid on 'don't slip ...'
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| link to bid on 'lilith contemplates the oceans ...' |
Have a piece of ‘lilith …’ with this photograph from my ‘lilith contemplates …’ series in which I take my sculpture ‘lilith …’ and photograph her in a myriad of surroundings. Here ‘lilith …’ contemplates the oceans - their beauty & what we humans are doing to them
link to bid on 'lilith contemplates the oceans ...'
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| link to auction catalog |
Wednesday, November 3, 2021
take a deep breath and enjoy the coming months ...
for your personal use - peace
“Fall has always been my favorite season.The time when everything bursts with its last beauty,as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.”Lauren DeStefano
Monday, October 18, 2021
Last week to experience 'lilith's room ...' in MA ...
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Tuesday, October 12, 2021
A blast from the part ... press from 2018
As I was looking back to some old info, I came across this interview and video from 2008!!
I had the pleasure of meeting with and speaking to Chris Bergeron from the MetroWest Daily News.
The video is particularly interesting because all of the dresses/sculptures that I was working on are either not finished or not even around anymore?!? The 'dress of glass ...' is still in the box that I moved it in when I changed studios and I keep thinking that I will finish it?!? but the others are a thing of the past. In fact I believe I did a video of a studio assistant breaking out of the red stick piece ... need to find that video.
I have also learned the hard way that articles and such do not always stay available of the web, so here is the article in full. And even though some of the pieces that I was working on are not around anymore my reasons for creating and my beliefs about the dressproject are still relevant.
Ready to wear: The art of Natick’s Virginia Fitzgerald
Sporting a paste-on tattoo of the Hindu goddess Shiva, Virginia Fitzgerald fashions a dress from hundreds of dog tags in her downtown Natick studio that resembles a child’s playhouse.
She moves barefoot past dresses she’s made from glass and eggshells, red licorice sticks and carrots.
A frock made of poems hangs by the door of the Pond Street studio where the Natick artist and mother of two young girls works on The Dress Project she created, carrot by seashell.
Over the last two years, Fitzgerald has created her own artistic line of “sculptural” dresses, stitching clothespins and ideas into the fabric of her deeply personal vision.
Though her daughters, Maya, 10, and Harriet, 7, stuck the tattoo on her back while playing, Fitzgerald said she identifies with its meaning. “Shiva is the goddess of destruction and creativity,” she said. “If anything, that’s what the dresses have taught me.”
For Fitzgerald, making the dresses is an expression of her own “experience as an artist, mother, wife and woman” in today’s world.
She has come to regard her dresses as “a multifaceted metaphor for birth, sexuality, a woman’s role to family and society: past, present and future.”
“As a child I was put in a dress. Lots of women grow up making connections between their prom dresses or wedding dresses and the events of their lives,” she said.
Whether using flower blossoms or pumpkins, for her the image of a dress “represents layers of the spiritual, emotional and physical presence of being female.”
Describing a dress formed from snaky ropes, Fitzgerald said, “Some people get scared. Some say it’s sexy. It makes some people think of S and M.”
Since its serendipitous beginning when playing with her daughters on a Maine beach, Fitzgerald’s Dress Project has grown into a vocation “with an energy and momentum all its own.”
In addition to earlier paintings, she’s exhibited her dresses in shows at Gallery 55 in Natick, Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham and recently at the Infinity Pool Court at the Natick Collection shopping center. In 2008 she won an award at the Concord Arts Association’s juried members show.
She expects to show new work in four fall exhibits at Bromfield Gallery in Boston this August; Natick Arts Open Studios on Oct. 4 and 5; ArtSpace in Maynard in October and November; and the Dana Hall School from Oct. 20 to Nov. 21.
Raised in Chicago, Fitzgerald was drawn to art as a child, sneaking up into the attic to draw pictures in old sketchbooks. “I was always the kid with the crayons,” she recalled.
Fitzgerald earned a bachelor’s degree in art at Kenyon College where she focused on printmaking and design. While later studying at the Studio Arts Center International in Florence, Italy, she began experimenting with conceptual sculptures including a chicken wire aquarium.
In 1992 Fitzgerald started a wholesale accessory and hand-painted design business, and after seven years switched to freelance illustration for announcements and greeting cards.
Like great oaks and gowns made of yellowing leaves, The Dress Project began with a tiny seed, in Fitzgerald’s case, a sticky wad of chewing gum.
“I was playing with Harriet at Elm Bank. We’d finished blowing bubbles and she asked what can we do now. I said we could make art with it,” she remembered. After going home and making a little dress from Harriet’s already-been-chewed gum, Fitzgerald awaited further inspiration.
Not long afterward, Fitzgerald, husband Steve Rovniak and their daughters were vacationing at Wells Beach, Maine, when a swarm of ladybugs made her wonder childlike about what kind of dresses they’d wear.
“The floodgates opened,” Fitzgerald said.
For three days, she scratched dress shapes in the sand. She decorated them with seaweed and kelp and watched the tides “take the dress back to the sea.”
“It was bordering on performance art in a way,” Fitzgerald said. “I kept drawing in my sketchbook. Talk about an obsession.”
Soon, to protest “overzealous fencing” of a favorite spot in Illinois, she made a dress of sticks clinging to a chain-link fence. And she later exhibited her Rose Dress in Gallery 55 in downtown Natick.
In time, Fitzgerald began using new materials to make more complex dresses like her Eat More Vegetables Dress to promote healthy nutrition and her 3,000 and Counting Dress, which used faux dog tags to protest the Iraq war.
After seeing airport screeners confiscate bottles larger than three ounces from passengers, she made her Red Alert Cocktail Dress from bottles filled with red liquid. “That’s a perfect example of The Dress Project. I know where I’m coming from,” she said. “A lot of people have different reactions. They think it’s about recycling or protecting the environment. They should have their own responses. I’m just the conduit.”
She stressed her dresses aren’t designed to express one specific concept but to prompt male and female viewers to consider them on her own terms.
“I like people to walk around them. Viewers should be able to have their own personal experience,” she said.
Wednesday, October 6, 2021
In honor of national pumpkin seed day
In honor of national pumpkin seed day, the first Wednesday of October, I’m reposting this post about my ‘Persephone’s dress …’ (see link below)
I have also learned some fun facts about pumpkin seeds:
- most nutritious plant based food
- great source of zinc, iron, & pumpkin seeds has 8.5% of plant based protein in 1 Oz.
So eat those pumpkin seeds!!!
And first eaten in 7000 B.C.
-Pumpkins themselves are thought to have first been discovered in North America and were widely used by Native Americans. Actual pumpkin seeds have been found in Mexico and date back as far as 7000 B.C.Pumpkin seeds have been eaten throughout history for sustenance and medicinal purposes too.
https://www.jcsqualityfoods.com.au/news/everything-you-need-to-know-about-pumpkin-seeds/
Saturday, October 2, 2021
Thursday, September 30, 2021
'lilith ...' is receiving guests this saturday ...
Come meet the artist and experience 'lilith's room ...'
at the Anderson Gallery, Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA.
This exhibit is the first time Fitzgerald has shown her 'dress of plastic ...' and
This exhibit is the first time Fitzgerald has shown her 'dress of plastic ...' and
as well as this Saturday, October 2nd.
This Saturday you can meet the artist and experience 'lilith's room ...'
as Fitzgerald will be gallery sitting from 12-3 pm.
- read more about 'lilith's room ...' on the virginiacreate's blog
- as a site-specific installation 'lilith's room ...' is best experienced in person.
- Anderson Gallery/ Bridgewater State University ~ 40 School Street, Bridgewater, MA 02325
- reach out to either the gallery at tel.508.531.2510 or email Virginia at va.work@comcast.net for more information or if you would like to set up time to see the exhibit.
Tuesday, September 14, 2021
a bit more about 'dear jeff ...'
With the airing of Chronicle's piece about 'dear jeff ...' I thought it would be a good time to share the story behind the sculpture and some of my work-in-progress sketches.
Memorializing Amy Toyen through artist Virginia Fitzgerald's creation 'Dear Jeff'
In front of the Avon Free Public Library in Connecticut is the statue in tribute to Amy Toyen who died during the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
For the interview, I went through some of my sketchbooks or what I call my daybooks. These are the books that I carry with me everywhere, and in which I put most everything; my 'to-do' lists, grocery lists, errands, important names and numbers, inspiring pictures, postcards and what-nots, and these are the books in which I write my ideas and figure out how these ideas are going to work.
Needless to say I have many, many 
of these books and it was quite an adventure to find the ones ('dear jeff ...' took me about a year to complete so the process spans 2 daybooks) I was using. But when I did it was interesting to see my sketches and notes and I thought I'd share some here.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW INTERVEIW
Here is a video of the sculpture on the loading dock at a 9/11 Memorial & Museum warehouse, on the day that I dropped off the sculpture to add to the museum's permanent collection.
Friday, September 10, 2021
'dear jeff ...' is part of WCVB5's 9/11: Chronicle Remembers
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| 'dear jeff ...' on the loading dock of the September 11 Museum's warehouse |
With tomorrow is the 20 year anniversary of 9/11, many media outlet are recalling the event and what has happened in these past 20 years. I had the honor of being interviewed by Chronicle, WCVB’s iconic evening newsmagazine, as part of one of their remembrance pieces.
The interview will air tonight, Friday September 10, at 7:30 (EST)
Wednesday, September 1, 2021
This month, let us never cease from thinking ...
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...Let us never cease from thinking--
Thank you Virginia Woolf, for this most appropriate quote for this month of learning,
September when many are heading back to school and work.
To me thinking and questioning and exploring is so important for us all ~
I believe that we are students all our lives.
Happy Learning & peace, Virginia
Thursday, August 26, 2021
'lilith's room ...' is open and waiting for visitors!
My installation 'lilith's room ...' is now installed, and is ready and waiting for visitors.
When you arrive in the gallery 'lilith ...' will beckon you to her unique room where a feast in blue and white awaits you. 'lilith's room ...' is a safe place to daydream and disappear, to wonder what and where you are and in this environment, what would you do??
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| photo by krismariephotography.com |
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| 'lilith's room ...' to the left, 'why is a writing desk ....' mixed media painting on canvas, 'dress of plastic ...' on the right |
I have created a dedicated blog page for this installation where I plan to post more photos, videos and further information about this piece. Also I encourage you to leave any thoughts or comments on that page.
thank you and peace ~
'lilith's room ...'
Anderson Gallery/ Bridgewater State University
August 19 - October 25, 2021
Art Center and Gallery
Open to the Public
Monday thru Friday, 9am-4pm.
Closed Holidays
Handicap Accessible
tel.508.531.2510
Open to the Public
Monday thru Friday, 9am-4pm.
Closed Holidays
Handicap Accessible
tel.508.531.2510
Monday, August 9, 2021
so this is happening ...
Earlier this year I was invited to have a solo exhibition at the Anderson Gallery at Bridgewater State University. When touring the gallery space I was told that I could paint on the walls which made my heart jump for joy.
I am very excited about this installation. I have been painting the components in my studio for the past few months and wish to share a few of the 'in process' photos and videos here.
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| lilith's rocking horse ... |
flipping the hanging fabric panel to paint the other side ...
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| the second side of the fabric panel wit ladder |
a quick look at how I create the particular line quality for my 'intuitive line painting'
a colleague suggested that my process creates a look similar to batik.
This is quite an undertaking so watch this space as there is more to come ...
thank you and peace
Wednesday, August 4, 2021
august is here and so is your #virginiacreates calendar ....
feel free to print and use as you wish!
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