wallflower

2025 - ongoing

Wallflower began while I was collecting 19th-century daguerreotypes for another project. Curious about the women inside these small cases, I scanned the plates to see them more clearly—the way they held their bodies, the careful arrangements of dress, their composure. When enlarged, their expressions revealed intimate subtleties that made me wonder what their lives actually looked like—and what limits they lived under.

My research led me to historian Barbara Welter, who coined the term “The Cult of True Womanhood,” also known as the “Cult of Domesticity,” to describe the ideals that shaped women’s lives in the 19th century: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. These expectations confined women to roles defined largely by marriage, motherhood, and the home. Yet even within these constraints, many women demonstrated remarkable strength, resilience, and determination. The earliest women’s rights movement began during this period—most famously at Seneca Falls in 1848—led by women pushing against the boundaries of their time. Their efforts remind us that the fight for autonomy and self-determination has always required courage, and that the pressures women face today are part of this ongoing continuum.

Wallflower reflects on this long arc of women’s roles and rights. The scanned portraits—daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes—are layered with textiles from the same time period, referencing the domestic setting that both protected and restricted women. Some images preserve the dignity and grace these women projected; others are intentionally disrupted, allowing unease, agency, and quiet defiance to surface.

Taken together, these portraits look back at the silence that shaped their lives and forward to the continuing fight for visibility, autonomy, and voice.