The Mills, Bereft
This work was accepted into the juried exhibition Artifact [BOLD], a biennial international juried exhibition celebrating graphic design, new media, printmaking, and the expanded field. The focus of this year’s exhibition was the idea of illustration, and was juried by designers Miriam Martincic and Kaleena Sales. The show was exhibited from March 16 through April 3, 2026 at the Sechrest Gallery at High Point University in North Carolina.
My poster diptych, The Mills, Bereft, was accepted. Here is the abstract submitted with the work:
This project explores archival materials that document the lived experiences of girls and women working in the textile mills of New England in the 1800s and 1900s. These posters use photographs from the National Child Labor Committee Collection at the US Library of Congress (systematically captured by Lewis Hine between 1908 and 1924), and content from The Lowell Offering, a literary journal wholly created by (predominantly female) mill workers at the Lowell textile mills in the 1840s. While these workers endured deprivation, hardship, and harsh conditions, they also wrote of the sense of freedom and empowerment that their employment brought them, especially at a time when options for women were limited. This sense of freedom is evident in many of these images, showing girls and women facing the camera with defiance, confidence, resilience, moxie, and pride. What might we glean about our own lives and conceptions of labor by examining the textures of theirs?
In this diptych, the workers have been trimmed out of the photographs, liberated from their labors and the physical space of the mills. While these incredible (and incredibly dangerous) machines wove textiles in the mills efficiently and at great speed, they could not function without persistent human intervention. Without the nimble fingers of human bodies, these elaborate machines would grind to a halt. Do these spaces miss the missing girls? These posters incorporate thread and tags to label each liberated worker with their name and role (if known), marking their place in case they return.
More information about the exhibition can be found here:
https://www.highpoint.edu/arts-design/sechrest-art-gallery/
https://www.highpoint.edu/arts-design/files/2026/02/AB-Prospectus-2026_v2_c.pdf