Chocolate, Woman with Chocolate
Created for the one-woman show, “Resilience”)
Original Performance Date: 2004, Harris Theatre, George Mason University, Set of 3 dresses created 2023
Media: Chocolate cookbooks Collage Assemblage,
Plastic Sheeting, Thread, Elmers Glue, Handmade Clay Beads, Satin Ribbon, Netting, and an Ambitious Barefoot Woman
Price: NFS
Artist: Jen Haefeli
Images by Photographer Melissa Lew

Chocolate, Woman with Chocolate displays a societal expectation; women are primed for marriage and eventually motherhood. The collaged chocolate cookbook provides stiffness, imagery, and recipes representing our hidden vulnerabilities, a guide we follow. The firm nature represents the prim and proper, Barefoot Kitchen Goddesses of decades in the past, who faithfully followed the dog-eared pages of their mother’s cookbooks, seemingly relinquishing their freedoms to follow societal trappings. Domestic Divas lacking joie de viv sucked from their core projected perfection while displaying a balanced perfect life that masked their internal vulnerabilities. What do women want out of life? Perhaps, Chocolate!

Chocolate, Woman with Chocolate, is 1/3 of a set of costuming for a solo exhibition and one-woman show performed at The Harris Theatre at George Mason University in 2004. This piece is a costume, and sculpture, and holds an important part of the story which is the body of “Resilience”, a three-part one act. As a singular piece, it tells its own story.