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By Marylu Walters
Alberta Connections
They call it "the little exhibit that
could."
 Fabrications: Stitching
Ourselves Together, an exhibit featuring 23
wedding dresses sewn by a Lacombe woman, has won
two national awards for the Red deer and District
Museum and a national tour starting with the
Canadian Museum of Civilization.
Fabrications started when sociologist
Dr. Kathryn Church was visiting her family in
Lacombe. She noticed her mother, Lorraine Church,
preparing to throw away the scribblers she used
to document the wedding dresses she had made for
friends, family and neighbors over a 45-year
period.
Kathryn, who says she had
rejected for herself the life of service to home
and family her mother represented, realized there
was history in those scribblers.
 "Sitting down with mom to
take her sewing scribblers seriously was an
important moment in our relationship," she
says in the narrative accompanying the exhibit.
"It broke my long-standing disinterest in
the people and events that captured her
attention. Listening to her narrate the pages, I
heard a social history not just of her own labor
and creativity but of a form of women's work and
relationship in a small prairie community."
Kathryn's first idea was to
exhibit her mother's work in a small venue such
as a church basement. She posted the idea on an
Internet museum list and eventually connection
with Wendy Martindale, executive director of the
Red Deer & District Museum.
 "The idea certainly
intrigued us, "Martindale says. "The
primary story is not the wedding dresses, but the
relationship of mother and daughter and the
evolution of the relationship as they viewed and
communicated with each other over the course of
the project. We knew it would have a really
powerful appeal to a lot of people."
Kathryn hunted down the dresses
and interviewed their owners. Their stories are
included in the exhibit. " I wanted to
communicate that with the dresses the women were
actually constructing the story of their lives
and of their lives as women," Kathryn told
CBC radio, which produced a documentary on the
project. "The exhibit is also about women in
many layers at many levels putting themselves
together." The exhibit is connected by
Kathryn's narrative about her relationship with
her mother and how it evolved during the project.
 Fabrications
premiered at the Red Deer & District Museum
in the summer of 1998. It opened at the Canadian
Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec, in Glenbow Museum in Calgary from February 6 to
August 29, 2000. Future stops include the Museum
of Industry in Stellarton, Nova Scotia, the
Museum and the Thunder Bay Art Gallery.
The exhibit received Awards of
Excellence recently from interpretation Canada in
the interior Exhibit category and for its
Web
site.
The Web site was designed by
Louise Mcleod, a former Canadian now living in
Pennsylvania who was so intrigued by the
exhibit's story that she volunteered her
services.
For information
Wendy
Martindale, executive director, Red Deer &
District Museum, 403-309-8439
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