Trained in sculpture, painting, drawing, jewelry, and textile conservation, Elizabeth Duffy is a multidisciplinary artist whose compulsive process and love of material culture drive her to mine the revelatory in the ordinary. Her recent work examines the intersection of domestic life and surveillance. Her work is influenced by feminist art, an itinerant way of life, and looking at the overlooked.
https://www.elizabethduffy.net/
Below is a conversation between Storefront Window Artist Elizabeth Duffy and artist Brittni Harvey
Brittni Harvey: In Wearing, you unravel braided rugs, objects deeply tied to domestic labor, to reimagine what they “may have been.” What motivates you to transform these utilitarian objects into garments, tents, or other forms, rather than preserving them in their original state?
Elizabeth Duffy: Thank you for these thoughtful questions Brittni.
I grew up in a dairy farming family and braided rugs were everywhere in the old farmhouses of my childhood. I couldn’t have articulated it then, but in some way they always struck me as containers of human history; probably because I knew they were made from scraps of clothing, blankets, and the remnants of everyday life. To young me they seemed dowdy and fastidious, gatherers of dust and women’s frustration. As an adult, I feel I’m revealing a domestic record that was never meant to be read. Transforming them into garments and sculptural forms gives the material a second life, one that reflects what might have been carried within it: the bodies, the labor, the histories that were bound up and stepped on. Rather than preserving the rugs as artifacts, I’m interested in opening them, interrupting their utility, and allowing them to take up space in a more active, visible way so they become stand-ins for the women who made them, vessels of memory, protection, and resilience reimagined as forms that move, breathe, and witness.
BH: You describe the unbraiding process as “something like an excavation,” revealing hidden patterns, holes, and traces of dirt. Can you talk about a specific moment during that process when you felt you were uncovering something surprising about the history or maker of the rug?
Wearing / Ironing Boards in the Wyoming Landscape. 2023, Ironing Boards, unraveled worn braided rug pieced into ironing board covers
ED: I have found so many interesting signs of life in them! One recent piece I made is a series of ironing board covers: . I remember finding the worn rug in a thrift shop. It felt really slippery—odd! When I unraveled it, I could see the toe, heel turns and gussets that are parts of socks—the entire rug was made of stockings! I figured the rug’s maker worked in or near a textile factory that made knitwear, but when I began working with it, I discovered many of the heels and toes had been darned, revealing an individual’s care, devotion and labor. The rug was made with someone’s worn sock collection. The darned holes in the socks were repairs of damage made by bodies, and then feet trampled holes in the rug. All of these forces brought to mind women’s unacknowledged labor across time. I’m thrilled this piece is now on view very close to where I found the rug, at the Forth Corner Foundation in Windham, Vermont.
One rug I took apart released a smell the moment I opened the first few braids—mothballs, sweat, and what felt like decades of closet scent captured in fabric. Inside I found a strip with three faded embroidered initials. It was clear the maker wasn’t embellishing; she was marking the cloth for some use, maybe to mark a child’s garment or household textile. That tiny, utilitarian gesture—the need to identify or claim something—suggested an entire story. These rugs are made of fragments of lives, and every stain, hole, or unexpected fabric choice feels like a message from someone who never expected to be seen.
Sentinels 2024 unraveled worn braided rug, ironing boards, rug remnant
BH: Several of your garments are made “with specific women in mind,” including historical figures (such as Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley) and personal ones (like your grandmother). How do you choose which figures to honor, and how do their lives influence the design of the pieces?
ED: I’m drawn to women who navigated contradiction, women who held both strength and vulnerability, who lived inside roles they were expected to perform while also breaking out of them. Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley, and my grandmother each exemplify a kind of resourcefulness and grit, though in vastly different contexts. My grandmother survived poverty in Ireland by collecting a bag of dandelions to eat every day; she pieced together enough money to buy a farmhouse in western Massachusetts, which is still in our family. I used dandelion and corn motifs (one of many crops they raised) to honor her tenacity.
Wearing / Ceremonial Costume for Catherine Rehill 2024
Place plays an important role as well. I made both the Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane pieces while in residence at Ucross in Wyoming. In that vast landscape, more than 100 years ago, they reshaped ideas around what gender could look like. I was also fascinated to learn that Annie Oakley made her own clothes! When I design a garment for them, I think about their environments, their bodies in motion, their public and private selves. These women help guide the form, and they also become collaborators…ghost presences shaping the choices I make. Often I work with artists I meet at residencies. Anna and Zoe, Pippi and Xander at the Wedding Cake House brought the garments thoroughly to life in that spectacular setting!
BH: How do you choose the individuals who wear and model the garments in Wearing, and what does the act of activating these pieces on specific bodies contribute to the meaning of the work?
ED: The people who wear the garments are women and men whose presence I trust. Artists, friends, neighbors…people who understand that each piece holds both fragility and weight. Sometimes I meet someone and can imagine them inhabiting a garment. Becky Hagenston, a writer from Mississippi I met at Yaddo, bore a strong resemblance to my grandmother, and I was thrilled when she agreed to model for me. When a garment is activated on a body, it becomes a living form. The movement reveals drape, stiffness, flexibility, and sometimes awkwardness. I love that. It reminds me that the original rugs kept bodies warm and comfortable, and now these reconstructed forms are held and shaped by bodies again. Conceptually, the activation connects the anonymous women who made the original textiles with contemporary bodies who continue the lineage of touch, care, and labor.
BH: Your statement frames Wearing as a memorial to “anonymous women makers.” In what ways do you hope viewers engage with this idea of anonymity, and how do you balance honoring those unseen histories with making very visible, wearable art?
ED: This is such a great question because it touches on the sense of ambivalence and anxiety I feel around the project and art making in general. As an artist I want my work to be seen, but I was indoctrinated into an Irish Catholic culture where women were not allowed to hold public space. Each day of her life my mother asked us: “When will I be recognized for all I have accomplished?!” Her question pierced through me as a child, haunts me today, and in some way, I think my work is an attempt to respond to her cri de coeur— a refusal to accept the mountain of loss, the destruction and negating of women’s labor and creative output. I feel privileged to respond to my mom’s plea by making work that celebrates the creativity of her generation and generations of women before and after her, listening to their voices, fragile and strong, loud, seething and quiet; no longer as invisible. I want viewers to feel the tension between visibility and invisibility. Domestic labor is often erased precisely because it happens in private spaces; the makers of these rugs did not sign their work or claim authorship. By transforming the rugs into bold, sculptural garments, I’m offering their labor a public, undeniable presence. Yet I also try to keep space for the unknown, letting frayed edges, stains, and holes speak without covering them. The anonymity becomes part of the story: a reminder of how many women shaped the world without recognition.
BH: How does the title Sentinels function within the Wearing series, particularly in relation to domestic objects as quiet guardians of memory and labor? What does naming these transformed rug forms as “watchers” or “protectors” reveal about their historical and emotional significance?
ED: Sentinels emerged from thinking about the Silent Sentinels—the more than 2,000 women who stood vigil outside the White House, 12 at a time, fighting for suffrage, and the ways domestic objects hold vigilance in a quieter register. It’s stunning to think silence can be that powerful. Rugs sit on the floor; they absorb dirt, sound, and the weight of daily life. When I reconstruct them into upright, garment-like sculptures, they take on a kind of presence, like guardians standing watch. Naming them Sentinels acknowledges both histories: the political bravery of the suffragists and the endurance of the women who braided these textiles. These forms stand as protectors of memory, carrying the emotional weight of lives lived in work, protest, and care.
BH: How did installing Wearing in the Storefront Window Gallery shape your understanding of the series, and what new layers of meaning emerged from presenting the work in a public-facing context?
ED: The storefront installation emphasized the relationship between private labor and public visibility. Seeing the garments and banners in the window, lit, suspended and facing the street, made them feel like emissaries from domestic interiors, suddenly present in civic space. People will encounter them unexpectedly on their way to work, walking home at night, running errands, waiting for the red light on Manton Ave. to turn green-the best viewing point! That casual, public contact added a new dimension to the work. It made me think about how these rugs once lived inside homes and now face outward, watching the world. The installation turned them into a form of public witness, echoing the suffragists’ stance and circling back to the idea of protection, vigilance, and making the unseen seen.
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Brittni Ann Harvey (b. 1992, RI) is a sculptor and textile-based artist and educator living and working in Fall River, MA. She has presented solo and two-person exhibitions at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery (New York), MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge), NOW: Gallery (Lima), Someday (New York), and Anthony Greaney (Somerville), among others. Harvey is the co-founder of the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art and holds a BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design.
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