Bedsheet Softies
Description
Once lock down began in NYC, Amato contemplated the idea of intimacy during a pandemic where reaching out physically and connecting with others intimately, could be fatal. How do single people navigate these freedoms taken for granted when an invisible threat is in the air? Turning to the safety of the virtual world seems to be our only option where the position of the voyeur is adopted and can safely satisfy to a certain degree. Amato turned to eBay to purchase used bed sheets from across America. These bed sheets became the starting point in investigating ‘softies’, a term blog mums use when referencing the soft toys they make for children. Soft toys comfort children and according to Donald Winnicott who coined the term ‘transitional object’, the soft toy acts as an object for transition from the oral-relationship with the mother to genuine object-relationships.
These sculptures were created using a single sheet and one continuously cut line of fabric, then stuffed with wool. Their seams are intentionally exposed to reflect on the parts of ourselves that we want to keep hidden or the messy, oozing, bodily functions of ourselves that we do not want to expose, both within intimate (personal)l and professional relationships . The colours of the bed sheets were chosen for representing both the internal and the external body.
Amato is currently working on this series in her Brooklyn studio.