Medium:
Upcycled Fabric, Beads, & Spikes
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Dimensions:
30” x 7” x 3.5”
 
Year Completed:
2026
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Description:
Thee Ol’ Ball n’ Chain confronts the casual language that has long reduced women (girlfriends and wives specifically) to burdens—objects of restraint rather than partners in life. Borrowing from the phrase often tossed off as a joke, the piece pushes that logic to its absurd extreme, materializing the “ball and chain” as something both cushioned and unsettling.
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At its center, a soft, velvet strawberry stands in for the feminine: ripe, desirable, and culturally coded as sweet, delicate, and consumable. But this softness is interrupted. Metal spikes pierce the surface, complicating the expectation of passivity and turning the object into something that resists easy handling. What is meant to be enjoyed becomes something that demands caution.
The chain itself, adorned with beads, reads more like jewelry than restraint—blurring the line between adornment and control. It asks: when does decoration become containment? When does affection become ownership?
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By translating a dismissive phrase into a tactile, intimate object, "Thee Ol’ Ball n’ Chain" exposes the idiocy—and quiet violence—embedded in humor that normalizes imbalance. It reclaims the “burden” as something complex: soft but not weak, beautiful but not compliant, and entirely unwilling to be reduced.