Tension Sanctuary
by Maria Samuelson
June 26 – 27, 2026
Part of the 2026 Serva Pool Flux Series
“My current body of work uses bra-making materials to shape and delineate space through tension, compression, and framing as a semblance of forces shaping decisions in women’s lives. Materials that mold prescribed female forms are removed from bodies and employed in exhibition spaces to instead shape the wall and the aesthetic arena. Meanwhile, the female form is absent from the site, inverting the legacy of venerating the canonized female figure that excludes women creators from the dialogue. The adaptable, flexible, off-kilter, open-ended nature of the individual pieces reflects acts of absorbing and contorting. The fluctuating bodily experience of a mother navigates between the physical havoc of childbearing/rearing and a recovered femininity. These pieces explore the aesthetics of reclaiming ownership and the performance of display. The adjustable hardware, modular attachments, straps placed in tension, forms stretched, and materials twisted and drooped are analogous to ways that women, mothers, and their bodies interrelate. This work finds parallels, echoes, and inspiration in religious imagery regarding women. Polarized portrayals of women in churches and cathedrals apportion the feminine into the humble, revered, and unattainable saint, epitomized in Mary, or the culpable temptress epitomized in Eve. The gap between these two is the actual place of the human, leaving the representation of women in so much religious imagery a deformation.”
