Description of a Girl's Dress c. 1937

This small drawing by Nancy Crimi – its date is unknown but Crimi died in 1995 - describes, with hand-written text and diagrams, the elements of a girl’s dress. The tone is matter-of-fact, a bit like an inventory. And that is the magic of it. Looking closely, I find a quiet kind of beauty in the density of words and the looping quality of Crimi’s handwriting; it’s as if the construction of the garment has been translated into script. The diagrammatic aspect is interesting; this isn’t a pattern, but a description *of* a pattern, like an exploded view of a dress, a cascade of instructions. I think of the descriptions in outsider art, the intense detail that hints at another world, another logic. The artist Susan Te Kahurangi King comes to mind, who also knew how to build and describe a parallel dimension. This drawing seems to be part of that continuing conversation about how we describe, in words and images, how we see.