For Better or for Worse

In For Better or for Worse, 2010, the artist shows us a woman’s head bearing various bruises that deform her face. The sculpture is enclosed in a sphere made of saw blades mounted in ellipses. The whole rests on a metal base that can be rotated by hand. On these metal ellipses and inside the sphere are placed shards of broken mirror. With the symbolism of misfortune attached to them, they refer directly to the condition of this battered woman — a woman imprisoned in the infernal spiral her marriage has become. The spiral is reinforced on the one hand by the grating ellipses that form her spherical cage, and on the other by the rotating foot the viewer is free to turn, bringing this woman’s hell back to life. But with Dyson, nothing is without escape. A pendant to this sculpture exists: the woman’s foot, in a stiletto-heeled pump, crushing the head of her torturer husband.