In observation of the New Year, two women artists collaborated to metaphorically remove the undesirable layers of the past. We began by adorning multiple pairs of women’s stockings, chosen to represent our own skin. We selected long dresses for warmth and pocket knives for utility. We sat on the floor, in the center of a cold room, and laboriously stitched the toes of our stockings together. We worked one layer at a time, one needle and thread at a time. As one of us stitched, the other guided the thread. The very slow, methodical movements of the arms, back and forth, enveloped us into a sort of trance like state. If at times our bodies cramped or lost feeling, we would pause to stretch or massage one another.

Once sewn together, we used our upper body strength to slowly pull ourselves apart; our hands to the floor, we pushed away from one another. We became dependent on our pocket knives to release pressure from around the waist, in hopes to maintain the stitches at the toes. We intended to shed each layer of the stockings jointly and simultaneously, but we struggled to balance the strength of each suture with the power of our own bodies. Our desire to work together challenged our desire to achieve individual freedom from the layer. Each time we pulled ourselves apart, one of us succeeded while the other was left to remove the layer independently. We repeated this action until both of us shed our five unwanted layers. Our final gesture was to remove our dresses. With one needle and thread, we worked together to stitch the openings of our sleeves together. Once completed, we stood and leaned towards one another, pulling the dresses over our heads and onto the floor. We abandoned the layers and walked towards the new year, renewed.

“Resolve” was performed in tandem with three other durational works by female artists. In the last hours of 2017, Jenée Childer’s muffled screams and Leilani Law’s singing bowls floated through the air, occasionally offset by the subtle crunch of Alissa Wall’s cabbages. “Resolve” was created for Last Night Fayetteville, a New Year’s Eve Festival in. Facilitated by Inverse Performance Art, it was performed in a historic stone cellar, now home to Fenix Fayetteville.