No Ornament So Precious as the Labor of Their Hands is a twenty-foot long book created from gloves I found while walking the streets of New York, as well as from gloves sent to me by friends and acquaintances. I sewed the gloves together as if they were pages in an enormous book of lost souls. I painted the gloves gold to elevate even the humblest, most tattered of them. In this presentation, they rise from silk clouds against a blue sky.
First created for my installation, Chapel of Uncommon Prayers, the work found a second home in the Space and Sequence exhibition depicted here, and curated by Jae Rossman at the Free Library of Philadelphia.