The Maxipad Princess was a dress-based monologue piece that I made during my MFA at Concordia University. The dress itself is made out of 320 Always™ maxipads, pink ribbon, and cotton lining. At first, I wanted to use scented maxipads, but sewing them together gave me a rash, so I switched to unscented maxipads.

I initially performed this piece in the basement of the Bourget Building (former Concordia MFA studios) in Hope Peterson’s installation, Always. Hope transformed this space (pictured above) that acted as an antechamber for the next room which looked in on a projection of Smurfette endlessly trying on the same white dress. The silver flowers on the wall were a riff on the old Tampax “discreet” box, where once you removed the cellophane wrapping, the box was unlabelled. The soundtrack for the installation was Patsy Cline’s, Always on a continuous loop. It was beautiful.