Her first collaboration with Wingate Studio, Braunig created this work over the course of two one- week visits in the spring of 2016. Beginning with a watercolor sketch of her image, Braunig experimented with a variety of etching processes before landing on aquatint etching, soft ground, sugar lift aquatint, and burnishing to achieve solid and transparent fields of color, and tube-like forms.

Braunig paints from observation, creating sculptures and still lives out of common materials such as clay, paper, and wood, which she intuitively augments and edits as she works. She portrays that historically burdened form, the female figure, as empowered within the vulnerable situation of being shown. Stretched fabric is a recent theme throughout her work, and serves as both an analogue for painting and a reference to the mortifying aspects of fashion. By obfuscating the differentiation between figure and ground, her subject is not merely a reflection of her atmosphere, but influences it as well—a visual metaphor for the objective of her work.

The figure in Stays does not inhabit her realm with bossiness or domination, as some of Braunig’s subjects do, but more delicately maintains her equilibrium within the picture frame. The figure does not test the confines of the canvas, but rather her body is formed by the forces of her garments—she hangs limp over her top and is stretched thin in the waist by the implied corset that lends the piece its name.

Courtesy of Wingate Studio