In the intimate atmosphere of Fisher Parrish Gallery in Brooklyn, an exhibition titled Useless Flowers blossoms with quiet intensity. It presents a compelling juxtaposition between two contemporary artists, Caitlin MacBride and Sam Stewart, both of whom delve into the symbolic and historical weight of the Shaker bonnet. This modest headpiece, once a tool of religious discipline and social separation, becomes the unlikely bridge between divergent artistic voices. Through oil painting and sculpture, MacBride and Stewart explore the nuances of modesty, labor, and spiritual austerity in modern contexts, creating works that speak powerfully to themes of identity, gender, and sacred restraint.
The Shakers, an 18th-century Christian sect known for their communal lifestyle, celibacy, and minimalist craftsmanship, developed garments that were as functional as they were symbolic. Among these, the Shaker bonnet held a unique place. Crafted with simplicity and purpose, it shielded the wearer from worldly distractions while fostering introspection and humility. It was not an ornament but a discipline rendered into fabric. By narrowing the visual field and cloaking the face, the bonnet served as both barrier and invitationa threshold between the spiritual and physical world, designed to strip away vanity and reaffirm communal devotion.
In Useless Flowers, this historical object serves as the conceptual thread binding the exhibition, but the artists pull it in distinct directions. MacBride’s large-scale oil paintings interpret the bonnet through a lens of visual intensity and emotional depth. Her work pivots on the tension between concealment and expression. Rather than replicating the subdued colors associated with 18th-century garments, MacBride floods her canvases with assertive, modern hues. These paintings are not quiet studies in nostalgia. They burst with color and form, allowing ropes, folds, and textiles to echo larger questions about freedom, structure, and female labor. MacBride transforms the bonnet from a historical artifact into a site of confrontation and reclaiming, giving voice to the often-silenced domestic rituals that shaped generations of women.
The Language of Fabric and Form: MacBride’s Poetic Resistance
MacBride’s paintings are imbued with a reverence for craft that transcends simple representation. Each composition begins with a grid, a formal structure that functions like the warp and weft of woven cloth. This grid is more than a visual scaffold; it nods to both utilitarian design and the compositional rigor of classical painting. Within this framework, MacBride’s subjectstextiles, ropes, foldsare elevated from domestic minutiae to icons of resistance and endurance. The act of sewing or binding becomes almost sacramental, pointing to a tradition where domestic labor was not merely functional but deeply spiritual.
Through her dynamic interplay of color, texture, and shape, MacBride animates the bonnet as a vehicle for exploring autonomy, repression, and the shifting boundaries of gendered expression. The twisting ropes and knotted fabrics she paints suggest both care and constraint, mirroring the paradoxes at the heart of modesty. In her work, the bonnet becomes not just a relic of another time but a prism that refracts ongoing conversations about self-presentation, visibility, and the power embedded in handwrought practices. It calls into question the very nature of adornment and utility, asking the viewer to consider the ways in which traditional femininity has been structured and policed.
Yet MacBride does not romanticize the past. Instead, she excavates it. Her paintings challenge viewers to reconsider the aesthetics and ethics of modesty through a contemporary lens. Each brushstroke speaks to the labor of making, the ritual of creation, and the spiritual residue embedded in tactile processes. By reimagining the bonnet not as a constraint but as a form of coded expression, MacBride uncovers layers of agency in the garments historically seen as symbols of repression.
Her use of saturated colors and tightly constructed forms draws the viewer into an intimate engagement with the subject. This is not a passive gaze but a demand for recognition of the bonnet as a site of history, identity, and symbolic resistance. MacBride’s work effectively transforms a religious garment into a living symbol, charged with emotion and meaning that stretches far beyond its original function.
Light, Presence, and Silence: Stewart’s Sculptural Meditations
Where MacBride uses the Shaker bonnet to explore vitality and resistance, Sam Stewart approaches the object with restraint and cool precision. His sculptural lamp installations, distributed evenly throughout the gallery, adopt the shape and spirit of the bonnet with quiet reverence. These are not lamps designed merely to illuminate; they exist in a liminal space between utility and art. Their soft, spectral glow creates an atmosphere of introspection, casting a light that is both inviting and disquieting. They seem to observe the viewer as much as they are observed, holding space with an eerie calm that invokes religious silence and domestic solitude.
The lamps are structured to resemble figures, standing in relation to each other and to the viewer with calculated distance. Wrapped in fabric reminiscent of Shaker bonnets, the shades obscure the light source, mimicking the very act of veiling that the original bonnets performed. This visual parallel creates a sense of bodily presence without form, an uncanny echo of the absent wearer. Stewart’s pieces challenge the function of both furniture and sculpture. They do not beg for interaction. Instead, they provoke contemplation, asking viewers to reconsider the boundaries between public and private, presence and absence, illumination and concealment.
There is a quiet theatricality to Stewart’s work. Each lamp stands as a sentinel, a witness, a relic of some forgotten ritual. The gallery becomes a stage where objects no longer serve their expected roles but instead meditate on the spaces they occupy. The spectral light they emit seems to contain the weight of spiritual discipline, evoking the sterile warmth of religious abstinence and the emotional austerity that defined the Shaker worldview. This stillness is not cold, but suspended. The lamps radiate a hushed insistence, reminding viewers of the psychological space modesty once occupied and still continues to inform.
Stewart’s practice walks a fine line between domesticity and conceptual abstraction. While the materials and form suggest a domestic setting, the execution denies comfort. His lamps should belong in homes, yet here they resist integration, standing slightly out of place, slightly too aware. The effect is haunting. It draws attention to how spiritual ideologies inscribe themselves onto everyday objects, how faith transforms furniture, clothing, and light into metaphors of belief.
In Stewart’s work, the Shaker bonnet is not explored for its historical craft alone but for its lingering psychic presence. The lamps do not romanticize the past; they summon its specter. This refusal to settle into nostalgia allows Stewart’s sculptures to function as quiet critiques and celebrations of domestic memory, casting a contemporary light on the intersections of gender, faith, and the quiet power of aesthetic restraint.
A Vessel of Tension: Reframing Modesty in Useless Flowers
Together, Caitlin MacBride and Sam Stewart offer an exhibition that is both formally restrained and emotionally potent. Anchored by the image of the Shaker bonnet, their works resist easy interpretation or reverence. Instead, they invite viewers into a conversation marked by contradiction, asking them to consider the interplay between utility and beauty, visibility and invisibility, submission and selfhood.
The title Useless Flowers itself becomes a meditation on meaning. At first glance, it suggests ornamentation without function, but within the context of the show, it unfolds into something richer. The flowers may be useless in a practical sense, yet they are laden with symbolic value. They speak to the impulse to find beauty within the austere, to extract narrative from silence, and to question what is deemed necessary in the aesthetic life.
The Shaker bonnet, as presented by MacBride and Stewart, becomes more than just an artifact. It transforms into a cipher of inquiry, a relic through which to examine the evolving relationships between gender, craft, and faith. It is no longer confined to historical memory. Instead, it exists in the liminal space between then and now, between use and symbolism, between concealment and expression.
To trace the path from Shaker discipline to contemporary artistic reflection is to explore a rich tapestry of paradoxes. MacBride and Stewart use their respective mediums to unravel the layers of modesty, labor, and spiritual tension that the bonnet represents. They do not simply present it as a quaint curiosity, but as a dynamic and provocative symbol that challenges viewers to reassess their own relationships to visibility, ritual, and the objects that silently shape our lives.
In this reimagined context, the bonnet is no longer a boundary. It becomes a bridge. Between past and present, between form and feeling, between faith and critique. It becomes, in the hands of these two artists, a powerful instrument not of concealment, but of revelation.
Unveiling Meaning: The Bonnet as Icon and Instrument
In Useless Flowers, the bonnet emerges not merely as a historic artifact but as a layered symbol that resonates across themes of gender, control, visibility, and spiritual devotion. This simple garment, traditionally associated with the Shaker community, becomes a central axis around which artists Caitlin MacBride and Sam Stewart pivot their explorations. Rather than treating it with sentimental reverence, both artists approach the bonnet as an object charged with philosophical inquiry, its form both concealing and revealing, limiting and liberating.
The Shakers, known for their austere, functional design and spiritual rigor, embraced the bonnet as a uniform of modesty. It flattened individual distinction, minimized distraction, and aligned with their ideals of communal purity. Yet within that suppression of ego lies a fertile tension: what does it mean to erase the self for a higher purpose? And in today’s hyper-visible world, what does it mean to revive that aesthetic of obscurity?
MacBride and Stewart are not interested in direct homage. Instead, their works interrogate the vestiges of these traditions, drawing lines between historical disciplines and contemporary anxieties. The bonnet becomes an active interlocutor in this dialogue, invoking the metaphysics of craftsmanship, the politics of dress, and the erotics of concealment. It is not merely seen but felt, an atmospheric presence that filters through the exhibition space like a quiet but insistent voice.
The effect is haunting. In Stewart’s work, the bonnet's symbolic properties are diffused into form and function, while MacBride renders it abstractly through gesture and pattern. What results is an immersive meditation on how we come to know ourselvesand how we hide ourselves from the world. This dialogue with the past does not serve as a return but as a reorientation, one that situates the viewer at the threshold between reflection and recognition.
Sculpting Silence: Sam Stewart’s Luminous Interventions
Sam Stewart’s sculptural works hold the viewer in a state of curious suspension. Designed to mimic the physical proximity of human presence, his domestic-scale lamps exude a quiet tension. These are not just decorative lights but embodiments of psychological space, illuminating the unseen interior worlds shaped by devotion, surveillance, and introspection. Their form is refined, yet they carry an eerie emotional residue, drawing on the haunting qualities of Shaker objects without replicating them.
Each lamp is veiled in a fabric shade that feels more like skin than cloth. This materiality positions the object between transparency and opacity, inviting the gaze while simultaneously deflecting it. The viewer is caught in a quiet paradoxat once invited to see and reminded of their role as a voyeur. These luminous objects almost breathe, animating the space with a ghostly presence that hovers between domesticity and disquiet.
Stewart's deliberate positioning of the lamps at eye level transforms them from static fixtures into participants within the room. They seem to observe as much as they are observed, subtly shifting the dynamics of the viewer-artwork relationship. In their restraint, they mirror the Shaker ideals of functionality and purity, yet they subvert these same principles through absurdity. A lamp that gestures toward existential inquiry, after all, is performing a function far beyond mere utility.
The light they emit is not traditionally illuminating. It is inward-facing, metaphorical. Rather than casting clarity onto external surfaces, it highlights the inner spaces of perception. These interiors are psychological, spiritual, and deeply personal. The works evoke rooms not only of homes but of minds, shaped by doctrines that value self-erasure, stillness, and moral containment. Stewart’s pieces function like spiritual litmus tests, reflecting back the viewer's own need for meaning or discomfort in the presence of ambiguity.
In these luminous sculptures, silence becomes a sculptural medium. The works hum with restrained intensity, embodying a paradoxical sense of stillness that is anything but passive. They resist resolution, instead existing in a perpetual state of becomingobjects that are both relics and provocations. Stewart does not seek to answer the viewer’s questions but invites them to dwell within them, surrounded by light that speaks in riddles.
Threaded Histories: Caitlin MacBride and the Politics of Pattern
While Stewart conjures spectral presences through light and form, Caitlin MacBride channels the spiritual and political energies of the Shaker legacy through paint. Her canvases are vivid, meticulously constructed, and quietly rebellious. Where Stewart offers the faint illumination of the uncanny, MacBride provides color, texture, and structure as forms of resistance. Her paintings draw on the visual language of textiles, particularly pleats, folds, and cords, embedding each with meaning far beyond surface decoration.
MacBride’s work lives at the intersection of domestic craft and high abstraction. Her compositions often rest upon adaptable grid systems, referencing both the logic of quilting and the formalism of early modernist painting. Yet these grids are not rigid. They bend, sway, and stretch, refusing to be confined. The geometry she employs is alive, responsive, and filled with tension. It speaks of order but also of resistance to that order.
The imagery of twisted cords and bound fabrics recurs throughout her paintings, hinting at themes of restriction and entrapment. These forms recall not just the physical labor of sewing or the tools of modesty but also the emotional and psychological binds that accompany them. Her colors are bold but never purely celebratory; they vibrate with ambivalence. Beauty, in MacBride’s world, is neither ornamental nor superficial. It is laden with struggle, encoded with history, and fundamentally political.
As the viewer moves through the exhibition, MacBride’s canvases increasingly assert their presence. They do not sit back quietly. Instead, they engage in a kind of confrontation, using softness as a strategic language. Textile arts, often dismissed in traditional art historical hierarchies as "feminine" or "decorative," become vehicles of expression and defiance. Her brushwork mimics the patience and precision of stitching, yet the narratives she weaves are anything but domestic in the limiting sense.
In echoing the democratic ideals of Shaker life, MacBride also complicates them. Equality in appearance, as enforced by uniform clothing, raises deeper questions about identity, autonomy, and agency. Her work does not romanticize this erasure but holds it up to scrutiny. In doing so, she invites us to consider what is lost in the pursuit of virtue and what remains unspoken in the silence of tradition. These canvases do not offer resolution; they offer reckoning.
Together, MacBride and Stewart invite the viewer into a space shaped by restraint and resonance. Their work engages with the legacy of Shaker design not to replicate its forms but to ask what those forms mean today. In an era of curated digital personas and algorithmic self-presentation, the exhibition subtly critiques the culture of overexposure. The bonnet, in this context, becomes a metaphor for the boundaries between self and society, visibility and retreat, authenticity and performance.
Useless Flowers resists easy interpretation. Its title suggests an intentional provocationa reference to the Shaker dismissal of non-functional decoration. Yet within the exhibition, beauty asserts itself as a kind of quiet rebellion. These flowers may be "useless" in the strictest utilitarian sense, but they carry symbolic weight. They bloom not in defiance of function but in expansion of it, showing that what is unnecessary can still be essential.
Modesty, light, color, and form converge in this thoughtful exhibition, not to offer conclusions but to open spaces of reflection. The artists’ refusal to resolve the tensions they explore is part of the exhibition’s power. Through bonnets, lamps, and painted folds, they pose urgent questions about identity, visibility, and the cost of silence. In their hands, the past is neither static nor sacredit is a tool, a lens, and a whisper from which new meanings emerge.
Reframing the Bonnet: From Historic Modesty to Symbolic Vessel
Within the immersive exhibition Useless Flowers, the Shaker bonnet transcends its status as a relic of religious attire and becomes a dynamic metaphor shaped by the hands of two contemporary artists, Caitlin MacBride and Sam Stewart. At Fisher Parrish Gallery, the bonnet acts less as a piece of historical fashion and more as a conceptual framework through which issues of identity, perception, and restraint are parsed and reconsidered. To remain within the atmosphere of Useless Flowers is to embrace a duality: to recognize absence not as void, but as presence defined by what is withheld.
The Shaker bonnet, historically worn to promote spiritual modesty and social withdrawal, gains new symbolic weight in the hands of these artists. Rather than portraying it as a static cultural artifact, MacBride and Stewart adopt the form as a vessel of mutabilitya visual echo that persists through their respective mediums of painting and sculpture. The bonnet no longer functions as a symbol of pious anonymity alone, but becomes a flexible architecture for exploring contemporary themes of concealment, revelation, gender, and spiritual resistance.
Stewart’s sculptural lamps evoke a particular tension, one where domesticity is rendered uncanny. His use of fabric shades, carefully crafted to resemble the curved restraint of the Shaker bonnet, introduces a subtle interplay between light and form. These pieces do not merely illuminatethey withhold. Light emerges filtered and diffused, occasionally seeping through seams or barely escaping the confines of the textile. The very design of these sculptures resists the conventional role of a lamp as a clarifier. Instead of providing transparency, they invite contemplation through shadow and ambiguity.
This ambiguity becomes a language in itself, one that draws on the legacy of utilitarian design only to subvert it. Stewart’s lamps, though pristine in their construction, do not offer ease. They stand in the gallery space like figures caught in a ritual, cloaked in silence, gesturing toward the weight of unseen histories. Each object becomes a kind of relicnot of worship, but of questioningasking viewers to consider the boundary between comfort and alienation within familiar forms. These works disrupt the domestic sphere not with noise, but with stillness, transforming everyday objects into psychological landscapes.
Embodied Absence and Material Memory
Where Stewart harnesses form to challenge function, Caitlin MacBride engages the tactile surface of painting to reclaim narrative through materiality. Her canvases, which often depict detailed renderings of textiles, folds, ribbons, and bonnets, go beyond visual representation. The fabric becomes flesh, layered and alive with memory. Her brushwork suggests labor, intimacy, and the residue of lives touched by repetition and ritual. MacBride’s treatment of cloth is not decorative; it is declarative.
The suggestion of colonial austerity, hinted at through rigid shapes and structured compositions, is subverted through bold use of color, amplified scale, and exaggerated textures. In her hands, the bonnet becomes neither costume nor propit transforms into a witness. Each painted pleat carries the suggestion of time pressed into form, of culture embedded into craft. These are not nostalgic portrayals but transmutations, in which historical silence is reinterpreted through vibrant material expression.
As one moves through the exhibition, MacBride’s work begins to pulse with increasing complexity. The threads and ropes she renders with such precision begin to tell stories of tension and intention. They are not mere restraints but directional forces, lines that pull history through the present. Her use of grids, softened by painterly decisions, recalls the structure of quiltsa nod to communal memory and the role of women’s labor in preserving cultural narrative. Yet, her approach avoids didacticism; instead, it welcomes contradiction, layering clarity with opacity and order with entanglement.
Her bonnets do not rest as symbolic accessories. They are avatars, embodying the weight of gendered expectation and artistic resistance. Each composition becomes a portal into a layered timeline, where craftsmanship becomes a form of resistance and surface becomes a site for cultural reclamation. These paintings feel haptic, not in the sense of physical touch, but through their suggestion of texture, rhythm, and the human hand that insists on visibility.
MacBride’s strategy of rendering visibility through materiality finds an echo in Stewart’s choice to evoke interior spaces through softened illumination. The conversation between the two artists unfolds not just through thematic overlap, but through the way each engages the tension between what is shown and what is withheld. Together, they dismantle assumptions embedded in the language of domesticity, inviting viewers to see restraint as a gesture of layered meaning rather than absence alone.
Symbolic Intersections: Modesty, Visibility, and the Architecture of Identity
The Shaker bonnet operates as a central axis throughout Useless Flowers, not as a token of spiritual discipline but as a lens for interrogating contemporary identity. In both MacBride’s and Stewart’s works, the bonnet becomes a proxy for understanding the shifting boundaries between interior life and public persona, solitude and community, withdrawal and expression. Its form is echoed in curves of canvas, folds of fabric, and arcs of light. Yet its meaning remains intentionally unstable.
For MacBride, the bonnet speaks to historical silencing and the radical act of reclaiming voice through the tactile language of painting. Her brush transcribes forgotten labor into visibility, transmuting passive objects into assertive presences. For Stewart, the bonnet silhouette is a floating signifierneither entirely physical nor entirely metaphoricalthrough which the viewer must interpret absence as form. His lights hover between utility and symbolism, complicating the idea that objects must perform clarity.
The mutual invocation of the bonnet across both bodies of work creates a kind of visual call-and-response. It becomes clear that neither artist seeks to re-enact Shaker ideals. Instead, they reprocess those valuesmodesty, simplicity, restraintas conceptual tools for exploring how we structure the visibility of the self. Modesty is not replicated; it is refracted. Spiritual rigor is not glorified; it is dissected and repositioned within a modern framework of identity and cultural performance.
As Useless Flowers unfolds, what emerges is not a singular narrative but a shifting terrain of meaning. The bonnet is not an endpoint, but a mediuma vessel through which larger questions about visibility, virtue, and the politics of attention are mapped. In our contemporary age, where online personas are carefully curated and digital life oscillates between hyper-exposure and strategic invisibility, the bonnet becomes startlingly prescient. It allows us to ask: who is allowed to be seen fully, and who must remain filtered? Where does concealment begin to function not as protection but as expression?
This reframing positions Useless Flowers as a study in contemporary vestigesnot artifacts preserved in reverence, but forms reimagined in rupture. Stewart’s light sculptures haunt domestic memory with their diffused glow, resisting the comfort their form suggests. MacBride’s vivid paintings vibrate with the labor of hands long overlooked, refusing the flattening of history. Each work in the exhibition resists passive consumption. They demand attentionnot just to their aesthetic details, but to the cultural sediments they bring to light.
Together, MacBride and Stewart conduct a kind of spiritual archaeology. But it is not belief they excavateit is form. It is containment. It is the human impulse to hide and to reveal, often simultaneously. They are not offering symbols to be decoded, but questions to be held. What happens when restraint is aestheticized? How does the veil, whether of cloth or of metaphor, shape our understanding of presence?
The conversation these works create is not merely about art or history, but about the very architecture of the self. In choosing the Shaker bonnet as a recurring motif, both artists elevate a historical object into a contemporary cipher, capable of bearing the weight of gender, labor, memory, and spiritual inquiry. The exhibition becomes a living dialoguebetween past and present, between seen and unseen, between silence and its resounding echo. And in this space, the veil becomes not just a covering, but a vessel, endlessly capable of carrying meaning forward.
The Bonnet as Resistance: Echoes of Silence and Survival
In the final chapter of Useless Flowers at Fisher Parrish Gallery, the Shaker bonnet emerges as more than a historical artifact or stylistic reference. It transforms into a profound symbol of resistance, a vessel of memory, and a powerful medium of silent communication. Where once the bonnet signified piety and submission, within this exhibition it becomes layered with meaningdeliberate, elusive, and radically present. Caitlin MacBride and Sam Stewart, through their distinct yet intersecting practices, approach the bonnet not as an object of nostalgia but as a living conduit of inquiry.
Stewart’s sculptural works, particularly his lamps, evolve in their final presentation from curious objects into silent sentinels. They hover within the space, human in their stature and spiritual in their stillness. The stitched fabric shades feel both ornamental and austere, calling to mind ecclesiastical vestments or ritualistic garb. With cloth that hints at breath and architecture that mimics restraint, they illuminate without spectacle. The light they emit is not for guiding the eye but for suggesting inner spacesunspoken realms of contemplation, control, and intimacy.
These lamps defy the ordinary expectations of function. Though designed as lighting fixtures, they offer a deeper purpose. Their quiet glow becomes a form of emotional mapping, marking spaces once filled with communal worship, now repurposed as zones of introspection. Stewart’s restraint in both light and form recalls Shaker principles, but here, devotion is not to religionit is to presence, to craft, and to the emotional charge of silence. The fabric shades, detailed with surgical precision, suggest a breathing organism cloaked in stillness. Their presence evokes not comfort but solemnity, holding space for stories untold, energies unspent, and virtues repressed.
Conversely, MacBride’s paintings surge with vitality. They seem to radiate from within, charged with the urgency of reclamation. Her work transcends mere representation; each canvas becomes an architectural gesture, folding and binding textures and forms once associated with domestic labor and feminine submission. She co-opts the visual language of the bonnetthe pleats, the woven strands, the structural curvatureand reframes them as symbols of survival and self-determination.
Her use of color does not merely revive these forms; it redefines them. Bold hues and sharp contours destabilize any passive interpretation. These are not sentimental odes to the past. They are declarations. The materials traditionally used to quiet or conceal are instead employed to assert identity, autonomy, and vitality. MacBride does not replicate historical imagery. She reconstructs it, deliberately breaking down the rigidities of modesty and spiritual control. Through each painted gesture, she renders the bonnet not as a relic of containment but as a portal toward self-expression.
The interplay between MacBride’s assertive strokes and Stewart’s quiet illuminations gives Useless Flowers a compelling dialectic. One whispers, the other insists. One contains, the other bursts. Together, they produce a tension that feels sacred and contemporary, intimate and collective.
Redefining the Domestic: Between Ritual and Rebellion
At the core of Useless Flowers lies an interrogation of the domestic realmnot as a quiet backdrop to larger narratives but as a charged site of meaning, resistance, and reinvention. The domestic sphere, so often dismissed as secondary or purely functional, emerges here as a complex theater of spiritual, political, and emotional life. Through the work of MacBride and Stewart, utility becomes poetry, and silence becomes a statement.
Stewart’s lamps, though silent, resonate deeply. Their tactile surfaces and sculptural forms nod to the handmade ethos of the Shaker movement, yet their presence within the gallery space strips them of conventional purpose. They do not offer light for visibility, but light as presence. Each lamp occupies a liminal space between furniture and monument. The positioning of the lamps at human height implicates the viewer physically, creating a sense of shared space that is neither domestic nor ecclesiastical, but something between. Their restrained design carries an emotional weight, quietly inviting the audience to consider what it means to dwell in silence, to be present without performance.
These structures feel almost liturgical. There is a rhythm to their repetition, a ceremonial order to their arrangement. Yet they lack doctrine. Instead, they hold ambiguity. They are not merely minimalist design objects; they are emotional instruments, attuned to the frequencies of longing, repression, and resilience.
In counterpoint, MacBride’s paintings rise like stained glass windows in a reimagined chapel of female experience. Her brushwork captures the essence of cloth, but the fabric is never static. It bends, stretches, and unfurls. The bonnet, which historically masked the wearer, here becomes a declaration of defiance. MacBride’s palette is neither subdued nor ornamental. It is insurgent. Each shade carries intentionality, pulling the viewer into a layered conversation about power, protection, visibility, and voice.
Where Stewart builds shrines of quietude, MacBride constructs altars of assertion. Her canvases exude presence. The textures she simulates speak to the labor of women’s hands, to histories of care and confinement, but also to the ingenuity embedded in craft. There is no passive beauty here. There is tension, rigor, and a deep understanding that the domestic has always held revolutionary potential.
Together, these two bodies of work rewrite the language of the interior. The gallery becomes a new kind of sanctumneither home nor church, but a hybrid space where reflection and rebellion coexist. The bonnet, once a device of spiritual modesty, is reframed as a cipher for personal and collective transformation.
Invoking the Sacred Present: Beyond Ornament to Endurance
The exhibition’s title, Useless Flowers, hints at ephemerality, at things discarded or deemed without function. But what unfolds within the walls of Fisher Parrish Gallery contradicts that suggestion. The works presented by MacBride and Stewart endure. They pulse with thought, intention, and presence. They challenge the idea that usefulness is the highest form of value. Instead, they propose a radical utility of presenceof being, of remembering, of resisting.
The Shaker bonnet, central to this exhibition’s metaphorical framework, was historically bound to a theology of austerity and control. But in the hands of these artists, it becomes a flexible architecturea site of reinterpretation and possibility. It no longer signals only modesty or submission. It becomes a map of constraint and resistance, a diagram of how bodies negotiate space, faith, and visibility. What was once a rigid marker of spiritual purity now becomes a form that contains both discipline and disruption.
There is a haunting beauty in this reclamation. The works do not seek to resurrect the Shaker tradition in full fidelity. Rather, they tease out its contradictions. The Shaker way of life, radical in its insistence on celibacy, equality, and communal living, is neither romanticized nor dismissed. It is engaged with, as one might approach a philosophical puzzleunfolding its parts, testing its relevance, exposing its edges. The exhibition reveres the discipline of the Shaker aesthetic while interrogating its implications for gender, identity, and creativity.
This layered approach gives the exhibition a timeless urgency. The past is not static. It is inhabited, challenged, and rewritten. The bonnet, through Stewart’s and MacBride’s hands, becomes a vessel not of nostalgia but of now. In the folds of fabric and the planes of pigment, in the quiet hum of light and the vivid saturation of paint, the form lives againtransformed, questioned, unbound.
Ultimately, Useless Flowers invites the viewer to reconsider the value of silence, the power of domestic form, and the resilience embedded in craft. It asks what it means to make beauty out of restraint, to create presence within absence, to dissent quietly or declare boldly. The works within do not aim to please. They aim to endure, to echo, to resonate across time and space.
Conclusion
Useless Flowers culminates in a quiet yet profound revelation: modest forms can carry expansive meaning. Through Caitlin MacBride’s bold, painterly reimaginings and Sam Stewart’s haunting sculptural illuminations, the Shaker bonnet transcends its historical origins to become a vessel of introspection, resistance, and renewal. The exhibition neither idolizes nor dismisses the pastit engages it, challenges it, and transforms it. In doing so, it redefines the domestic and the spiritual as sites of power. Here, beauty is not decorativeit is deliberate. Through silence, tension, and material memory, Useless Flowers blooms into enduring relevance.
