“Kate Hamilton: The Changing Room,” which recently closed at Cape Cod Community College’s Higgins Gallery, was yet another cutting-edge show curated by savvy and hip art professor Nathalie Ferrier, a French transplant to our Atlantic shores. Featuring Hamilton’s conceptual fabric art, the work derived mostly from her experience as a costumer for experimental, imagist, absurdist theater, much of it staged in Zurich, Switzerland.
A light and airy, white-walled space led to an equally light and airy mostly white collection. The first artifact was a huge poncho-like blouse of a “Pussy Bow, Untied” into a scarf of yards of paper attached to an old-fashioned Remington typewriter. Visitors were invited to type on it, words of rebellion and freedom preferably, for the walk-in blouse and scarf is representative of women undoing the construction/constriction of male inspired clothing/domination. The object is made not of paper, but of lightweight, see-through racing sail cloth.
Another walk-in sail cloth piece was an impression of a whalebone corset, and hanging next to it was a series of aluminum mesh Quaker bonnets, their neat conforming repression a complement to the corset. Nearby a jacket of sail sloth exhibited typed words from Hamilton’s diary including, “I wanted to correct something that had been gross. And to do that I needed to open things up. I needed to untie a knot.”
Hamilton began using sail cloth after crafting art clothes and costumes from glassine paper, which she described as being like wax paper. She liked how these materials fall against gravity yet float and have a passage of light through them. As one student at the showing I attended commented, “These are very like ghosts.” And yes, Hamilton said, she was thinking about the recent passage of some people close to her when she began to experiment with these materials.
On the floor in the middle of the exhibit sat is a cloth white fish skeleton sewn onto a dark background, longer than a person. Two halyard ropes attached to it on either end allowed two people to hoist the object into a boat, and then a hammock. Hamilton said she was trying to craft a hooped petticoat which could metamorphose into a boat for a gender-bending stage version of the Odyssey but failed and came up with this instead.
The artist, intrigued by the ocean and ships, also does small artworks very well; she hung a hand-sized wire mesh dinghy, with oars, foxily crafted, featuring a starboard of a fish. Beyond it was a chest high representation of a fishhook, what Hamilton said is also an upside-down question mark, dragging a sheet of banned books and words. Hamilton mentioned using the image files at the New York Public library to obsess over ships, Xeroxing many to study. I can identify with that, having done the same for similar subjects there years back.
Some other pieces were not interactive, such as a wall of small, framed insects, mostly beetles. After covid a year and a half ago, Hamilton lost the use of an arm and hand for a time, and with complications she is still dealing with, began to paint small, starting with spiders, inspired by Ariadne (a mythological Cretan princess) which was and may still become a play, with costumes created by her.
Aware of her own changing physical state and limitations, Hamilton said that much of her work is very much about the physical body, and how the body, which is conspicuously not within any of her objects, moves in its changes through time, in an Odyssey of the world changing, and of her own bodily changes within it. Hence, the title, “The Changing Room,” that also, of course, is a play on words for the costumes themselves. Continuing the theme, there is an “Odyssey Suitcase” into which you can cast paper boats you are instructed to make.
“I think in tangents,” she commented. “I can’t write an outline. But sometimes the tangents gel.”
The exhibition gelled and resonated with this writer, a playwright herself in love with experimental theater. I kept wanting to write a play for it. Perhaps you will, too. Though this exhibit is just done, you can see some of Hamilton’s originality and creativity on her website, katehamiltonstudio.com.
Hamilton’s next art/theater project under discussion is “exploring the Divine Comedy — likely staying with the hellish parts,” she said from her home studio in New Paltz, New York, where she is “fiddling around with puppets” and planning for a possible local show.
(“Kate Hamilton: The Changing Room” was exhibited from August 28 through September 26, 2025. The next exhibition at the Higgins Art Gallery at Cape Cod Community College is “Echoes in the Tide: Marine Debris Art Responding to Ocean and Social Justice,” running from October 8 through November 12, 2025, and featuring works Mark Adams, Cicada, Jay Critchley, Peter Hutchinson, Nicolas Nobili, Duke Riley and Erin Woodbrey. The opening reception takes place on Wednesday, October 8 from 3-6 p.m.
The Higgins Art Gallery is normally open on Tuesday and Thursday from 9 a.m.-4 p.m., Friday from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. and by appointment and located in the Tilden Arts Center, 2240 Iyannough Road, West Barnstable, Massachusetts. For more information, visit capecod.edu/higgins/)