Dresses for Giants - Crimson & On an Island Within an Island – ACS Margate

The exhibition Dresses for Giants presents the last phase of Goldsmith’s investigation into the psychologist Julian B. Rotter’s theory Locus of Control. ‘The vintage polyester wedding dresses purchased in Cincinnati, USA are large in physical scale, but the title refers to the personalities of the individuals who wear the dress, not their physicality.’ 

With a feminist viewpoint, Goldsmith unpicks established psychological theory to better understand human interactions, how we live our lives and what shapes us.  Taking an autoethnographic approach she views her clothes, our clothes, as a place we inhabit as home, psychologically and physically.  At every turn our world presents evidence of this truly ‘mobile home’, living life in cloth, from ordinary day-to-day routines and ceremonies like weddings to powerfully emotive life events, such as migration and displacement

‘Together with Goldsmith’s interventions –photography and dye-sublimation – the dress form becomes a canvas and an idol, the ultimate staging for both Rotter’s influential theory and the artist’s quest to better understand our own fragility’.     

Dal Chodha Editor Archivist Addendum