No one sees Victorian body containers like Martina Cox, not even their makers—least of all them. Waist Management toasts the long dead sisters, their private wrappings and their unseen labors. Dress goods of theirs spilling their guts, thousands of hours of invisible stitchery modeled by Martina’s ranks of pencils—and on occasion, her own needle. That is the dimensional kicker, she stabbed stitches just like they did. Stitch is time marked in thread, and time is wound all around thiswork: the sheer history of it, 1890s dress history,  a tiny stripey watch pocket; the thousands of hours of miniature construction in textile, the hundreds of thousands of pencil marks to match, the month it took to transmute crumpled silk and bobbin lace to graphite.

The bodices are hyperreal and totally fake. You feel you can pick one up and fondle it, sniff it, try it on, but no, it’s a dress ghost and we’ll never meet. Collected not from bodices in the flesh, but bodice images in the digital, this left a pleasing constraint – the placement of prearranged wrinkles, topography and invisible sleeves were not her choices to make. They are splayed open to document the inside, purely for… you. So few eyes were ever laid on them – these backs of embroideries that people call the dark sides, so…consider yourself lucky?

 — Kate Sekules