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Loosely based on Karady’s childhood memories of growing up in suburban New Jersey, Splitting Seams explores the relationship between mother and child and the psychological processes of female identity formation. Here, Karady has represented herself as a child who is playing mother to an identically dressed doll. The dolls, the clothing and the locations are all authentic artifacts from her childhood. Her mother was a fashion designer who sacrificed her career to raise children, and consequently, she channeled her creative energy into making matching outfits for her two daughters and their dolls.
In choosing to represent herself as embodying the position of both mother and child simultaneously, Karady proposes an individual response to the socialization of women and girls into mothers, challenging the easy association of “woman” with “mother.” The common practice of little girls playing dress up as adults has been reversed: she squeezed her adult body into the authentic clothing that she wore between ages five and twelve. This perverse and somewhat masochistic performative act evokes the eternal quest for youth with irony. Yet the presence of both empathy for and resistance to "mothering" in Splitting Seams reflects the idea that the act of mothering "involves a double identification for women, both as mother and child."
Splitting Seams was presented with an audio component that plays on the Freudian interpretation of the act of "playing with dolls," one which posits a process of identification of the girl with her mother – the girl takes on the role of mother in relation to the doll. In this audio monologue, Karady "speaks" the part of a mother talking to her daughter. The script was based on interviews with her own mother.
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