The Farmer's Wife and the Colored Graveyard

Rural women are the subject of Dial’s large two-sided assemblage The Farmer’s Wife and the Colored Graveyard, created from 2005 to 2007. The protagonist in this unruly construction is the truncated mannequin figure of a white woman, surrounded by a clock, a baby doll, a water fountain, bird figures, flowers, barren tree branches, the jawbone of a cow, and other referents for the passage of time and the life cycle. On the reverse side of the piece is the image of a graveyard, a further symbol of life’s constant succession of death and renewal, which Dial links to the generative powers of women. —Joanne Cubbs