When you come across a series titled, Doilies of Imminent Destruction, clearly, you have to write about it.  This beautiful, and eery, work is by American artist Lauri Lynnxe Murphy. Each delicate doily features the site of a nuclear disaster {1) Chernobyl 2) Deepwater Horizon  3) Fukushima  4) Three Mile Island}. Why cut the images of these disasters from doilies you ask? I’ll let Lauri explain:

“…doilies have a function… to beautify the ugly.  They are meant to cover the water stain on the side table, the worn spot on the chair arm.  Conversely, they are also used for protection in this sense, to prevent our furniture from becoming damaged in the first place.  To protect the appearances of our domestic space, despite what might be underneath.  Doilies also speak to an old-fashioned nostalgia.  They are accouterments of another era, and reminders of gendered labor.  Tatting and crocheting lace doilies was a domestic task for generations of women, laborious and painstaking.  The desired outcome was a perfection of form that would become an heirloom, evidence of a desire for beautification.  But as we have seen in each of the disaster sites depicted, perfection is unrealistic — stitches are dropped, mistakes are made, the human hand is always present, sometimes to disastrous ends.”

{ps. Lauri has a show opening in New York on September 27th, at 632 on Hudson}