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?

Martina performs a kind of transubstantiation from flesh and blood to paper and pencil (and stitch) to make the in sides not just guts, a term for dress viscera, but gut flora. She brings us news and views from the front, where the action is. What transpires when dress meets flesh where the torso carves out territory, where the stomach sits, the seat of female intuition, the second brain, the microbiome?

The interior landscapes are taxidermy-like, with baleen strips stitched into cotton, silk and linen channels, always an odd number of them, whether fewer fatter bones oversewn with herringbone or the many, many dainty ones inserted into the refined Arsenic and lovelace, the only upper class lady here. She looks to be the only professionally made bodice of the bunch, which is no shade. Rendered in graphite and the best stitches here, sitting modestly among the messier ones, the ones that went awry, where the individual hand is showing— non-elite, amateur hands. In fact, sloppier stitches might be more evidence of good time management than bad workwomanship, since everyone, but everyone, remade and remodeled every gown, often for decades, and stitches were worked to be easily removable. The whalebone casings are exceptions to that: so time intensive, they were built to last.

Overall, what we forget, or never knew, is that textile goods were fiendishly expensive and precious, even when not handmade like these. In any case, menswear markets were far earlier than women’s to adopt the “readymades” simply because the wearing needs of women were much too complex and fiddly for a machine to produce.

The earliest of these are Gut Flora III, which represents the wholly different, mid-eighteenth century dressing system, and Spinal Top, Cast Off, and Landscape with Hooks, which date from the 1860s, when industrial production was only just beginning to crank up. The others Martina selected were all born around 1890, an interesting time to get dressed, when women were allowed to exercise and work, if not vote, and the eye was shifting from exaggerated rear to oversized sleeve: or from bustle (more shelfy than its first round twenty years before) to gigot sleeve. Corsets were about to bend women into a pigeon-fronted S-shape, but not quite yet. These were still upright days of boned bodices.

“This is when the grotesquerie of underwear began to have its own slightly morbid but positive appeal, along with the increasingly deliberate seductiveness of its actual materials and trim,” wrote Anne Hollander in Seeing Through Clothes, her 1978 book about clothes and bodies in Western art that is a key reference for Martina. It is a landmark work altogether. Hollander was the first art historian to take clothes seriously, who interpreted centuries of draping, nudity, and fashion as of more than surface importance. “The proportions of the female torso,” she wrote, “is the most significant field of fashionable alteration.” Waist Management shows the truth of those torso proportions, seen through Hollander’s “actual materials and trim.” Literally. Martina’s topstitching was originally a solution for the technical problem of showing pale thread on a dark ground, but has added a delicious visceral element, ostensibly replicating the dead women’s work, only really not at all: “Stitching is fun. That part feels sculptural, flipping the paper, making a circumference of two feet around you,” Martina says. But the original stitches of course, made tiny two-inch circles, close to the body. These through paper are gestural, extra dimensional, So is the hardware. “Landscape with Hooks is everyone’s favorite,” Martina says, “there’s something eerie about it. That’s got such a history, women’s body as landscape.” Also it has period hooks, their partners sewn onto Newey’s Imperial Eye. “I love it when they’re rusty, and when the package says rust free,” says Martina.

Talking of hardware, or actual materials, or “the grotesquerie of underwear,” not everything in the room is flat: there are sculptures. They are representatives from the naughty nether regions: cheeky beings born of horsehair-stuffed linen tournure—skirt supporter pad, or bustle. “Bustle” was a scurrilous word back in the day, as was leg: stockings were known as footwear. Indecency isn’t high in our vocabulary now, and yet bodily function can still suggest the grotesque. Peer at Horse Girl I with her garniture of pube-like horsehairs. “She makes everyone really uncomfortable,” admitsMartina. “That’s why she  has a little tear.” Causing squirm is this artist’s happy place. Intimacy, vulnerabilities and power shifts that “come with inhabiting a femme body” are a big theme, along with the functionality and history of clothing. Previous works include garments with clear PVC floral-curtained windows opening onto erogenous parts, pieces made from kitchen rags, worn out bedsheets, cotton printed with penile ears of corn. Those referenced surrealism, led her to the radical, embodied, provocative work of the Austrian performance artist VALIE EXPORT (google “Aktionhose: Genitalpanik”), and the paintings of Christina Ramberg, all shoes, hair, corsets as urns or tabby cats, and genital abstractions—as Martina says, “dark femme torso and clothes-core.”

Waist Management is all that, with the dress guts, splayed bodices, torso prosthesis so soberly, painstakingly rendered. But what is also important, and what the Horse Girls reclining on smocked, stiffened silks and the clingy men clambering around a crinoline cage make abundantly clear, if we hadn’t already noticed: these Gut Flora are totally winking.

 — Kate Sekules